ABSTRACT
A generation can be defined as a society-wide peer group, born over a period of roughly the same length as the passage from youth to adulthood, who collectively possess a common persona. The generational names used in this book are the handiwork of popular culture, with some being drawn from a historic event, others from social or demographic change, and others from a turn in the calendar. Generations are far from an exact science and can legitimately be pegged as somewhat arbitrary. There are potentially numerous other ways to classify age cohorts in a manner that would be conducive to analyzing political generational divides. For political analysis the goal is to have generational cohorts that are large enough to possibly produce noteworthy distinctions between the generations, but not too large as to become essentially meaningless. According to our definitions, each generation is similar in its longevity, ranging from 16 to 19 years in length. From oldest to youngest, the generations we will compare are: (1) the Greatest Generation (those born in 1910–1927), (2) the Silent Generation (those born in 1928–1945), (3) the Baby Boomer Generation (those born in 1946–1964), (4) Generation X (those born in 1965–1980), (5) the Millennial Generation (those born in 1981–1996), and (6) Generation Z (those adults born after 1996).
