They witnessed the Civil Rights Movement. They lived through the Vietnam War. And in the story of their journey from high school to older adulthood, there may lie critical clues to the fractured political polarization the United States is experiencing today.
Back in the late 1960s, a group of political scientists interviewed hundreds of individuals across the United States who graduated from high school in 1965 about their social and political beliefs. The researchers continued to interview the cohort, who eventually came to be known as the Political Socialization Study, once each decade up through 1997, measuring and recording any changes in their viewpoints.
“It’s a really valuable study, because it’s one of the very few studies we have in political science of American politics that tracks people over time and re-interviews them over the course of their life,” says Katherine J. Cramer (’94), the Natalie C. Holton Chair of Letters & Science and the Virginia Sapiro Professor of Political Science. Cramer worked on the study as a graduate student at the University of Michigan.
Recently, Cramer re-visited it as the centerpiece of her latest research project and book. Pairing with her longtime friend and mentor Larry M. Bartels, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University, she went back and re-interviewed dozens of the study’s original participants, now in their 70s. The result is a book titled The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation.
In addition to tracing these individuals’ reactions to an era of unprecedently massive social and political upheaval, the book upends several commonly held theories about the roots of modern political polarization. The conversations revealed that, contrary to the widely held notion that individuals become more conservative politically as they age, for this group that shift happened much earlier.
“We have a pretty strong sense in political science that your ideas about politics really crystallize a lot in your teens and early 20s,” Cramer explains. “The data suggests to us that a lot of those things were in place before they ever graduated from high school, which is contrary to the way we think about political divisions now. Some think Donald Trump came in and divided the country, and we find actually these divides have been growing since at least 1965.”
The study’s cohort was predominantly white, reflective of the demographics of the country at the time — the group contained very few people who are Black or Latinx, and many of them who were part of the first round of interviews dropped out of the process in successive decades. And even though many tend to view teenagers of the 1960s as “the hippie generation,” roughly half of the group shifted to the right, perhaps in a backlash response to the sweeping social changes going on around them.
Several of the original study questions were designed to measure participants’ views on traditional morality. For example, one question asked whether the cohort considered the Bible as the unassailable Word of God, a nice set of stories or somewhere in between.
“You can take people’s responses to that question back in 1965, and it predicts how they felt about gay rights in the 1997 survey,” Cramer says. But while the answers to the survey questions tended to be stark, the interviews Cramer and Bartels conducted decades later showed a later-life ambivalence about some of the social issues raised by the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.
“By the end of an hour and a half with these people, we had such a different understanding of who they were and how they had processed politics over the course of their life,” Cramer notes.
Cramer and Bartels discovered other things from revisiting the cohort. For instance, the commonly held theory that the Moral Majority, the political movement first founded in 1979, was the coalescing force that drove traditionally conservative voters toward the Republican party, was less important.
“We saw a close correspondence between Republican partisanship and traditional morality views in 1973,” says Cramer. “They were really in place before the Moral Majority ever came on board. And then we also see over the course of these people’s lives that church going, and not necessarily a sense of traditional morality, became a basis for a strong relationship with Republican identity.”
Revisiting the study participants was another opportunity for Cramer to do one of her favorite things as a political scientist — sit down with people and let them speak about themselves. It’s an approach she popularized with her fourth book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness and the Rise of Scott Walker, a work that examined the ways the Republican party in Wisconsin leveraged tensions between rural and urban residents to gain political power.
“It’s easy to stereotype and make assumptions about people with a certain political profile,” she says. “And then when you give them the opportunity to talk out loud and piece it all together in the moment, their humanity is so obvious. You can see how they struggle and are trying genuinely to make sense of it all and do the right thing, whatever that means to them.”
For Cramer, re-interviewing some of the cohort and co-writing the book was eye-opening. More than anything else, she’s come to understand that this country has been polarized far longer than people realize.
“It’s been a long time coming, and it’s a function of how people in the public have tried to make sense of the many changes this country has experienced, whether we’re talking about social change or economic change,” she says. “Generally, we found that many of the current divides in the United States can be traced back to these folks’ beliefs as high schoolers.”