We love simple labels: Gen Z is “climate-conscious,” Millennials are “socially liberal,” and Boomers are “conservative”. These heuristics assume that age alone determines worldview. However, results from Palumba’s 2024 EU election mission demonstrate that this myth is unfounded. If you think youth are all on the same page, the data suggests a far more complex reality. While we often stereotype generations as monolithic blocs, Palumba’s data reveals a “Great Reversal”: Millennials trended toward consensus, but Generation Z is exhibiting the highest internal ideological division on record. This article examines how a faster pace of social change is fracturing the youngest voters into antagonistic “generation units.” Furthermore, it will analyse what exactly fractures Gen Z and how the Great Reversal is not a clash over fundamental values but a clash over competing visions of a desirable global world order.
Even so, how do we measure intragenerational disagreement? Ideological polarization is measured as the average within-cohort variance of responses. High variance indicates greater ideological division. When analysing the data, a striking trend is revealed: while Millennials (Gen Y) trended toward ideological consensus, reaching a low variance of 1.8 for those born after 1987, Generation Z shows the highest level of internal disagreement on record. More specifically, the trajectory flipped, beginning with people born after 1997. Gen Z’s variance surges past 2.5, indicating that the youngest voters are defining a new era of heterogeneity rather than a unified front.
The idea that a birth year predetermines a worldview stems from Karl Mannheim’s 1928 essay, “The Sociological Problem of Generations”. Mannheim argued people born around the same year share a common range of foundational historical events, which predetermines individuals toward a “certain characteristic mode of thought and experience“ that influences the types of actions and beliefs they pursue. However, he crucially warns against viewing generations as a monolithic bloc; they comprise multiple “generation units”, subgroups who interpret shared events differently depending on class, education, gender, or social environment. Palumba’s findings support this by highlighting how generational labels often obscure deep-seated internal fractures and by demonstrating the non-monolithic nature of age cohorts.
Moreover, Palumba’s data shows that Generation X is more internally divided than Millennials, with responses appearing much more dispersed. These findings align with recent research describing Gen X as a “hinge generation”—an in-between group which never fully formed a unified political profile. A 2020 study shows Gen X has the weakest sense of shared generational identity. This weak sense of shared identity is mainly attributable to differences in perceptions of globalization’s effects and benefits. In their survey focusing on Generational Consciousness Battery, conducted on U.S. adults, Munger and Plutzer find that Gen X scores lowest on identity salience, generational linked fate, and issue alignment, meaning they are less likely than Boomers or Millennials to feel that “people like me in this generation share the same interests” or to line up on the same side of key political issues. For instance, in U.S. politics, early Gen Xers born before 1973 are considerably more conservative and Republican leaning than late Gen Xers born after 1973.
Millennials (Gen Y), by contrast, show stronger internal alignment and share a distinct “generation identity” rooted in common formative experiences: growing up with the internet, witnessing 9/11, entering adulthood around the 2008 financial crisis… These shared shocks have shaped a common political attitude across the generation, as reflected in the low variance in their responses to the Palumba mission. The Palumba data is also consistent with a Pew Research Center report finding that Millennials are the only generation in which a majority hold consistently or mostly liberal positions across a range of political questions. These differences in historical context and pace of social change explain why Gen X is less homogeneous than Gen Y, resulting in a more defined political profile for Gen Y.
Going back to the “Great Reversal”, what has led Gen Z to fragment more than millennials? One source of analysis is the acceleration of tempo in social and cultural change. When change happens too quickly for traditional patterns to adapt, it creates “intermediary shades” of novel impulses and conflicting opinions, which are reflected in the high variance within Gen Z. Looking at the data, evidence of the consequences of an acceleration can be found after 1997, when the variance sharply increases among Gen Z. Gen Z perfectly illustrates Mannheim’s “Generation as Actuality”: a cohort defined not by consensus, but by being fractured into multiple units that process a destabilized world in divergent ways.
The next question, therefore, is which issues divide Gen Z most. Figure 2 ranks political and policy topics by the degree of internal disagreement within Gen Z, measured by standard deviation: higher values indicate greater polarisation. The most divisive issues concern migration and environmental policy—topics that are inherently transnational and involve clear trade-offs. Migration stands out as the most contentious issue, exhibiting the highest standard deviation across both genders (1.68), while rights-based and humanitarian issues show much stronger internal consensus, as analysed above.
These patterns align closely with transnational cleavage theory, which describes political divides which cut across nations, generations, and parties. Classic cleavage theory explained political divisions in terms of national conflicts such as class, religion, and center–periphery tensions. However, since the 1990s, scholars have shown that new lines of conflict increasingly transcend national borders. Hooghe and Marks conceptualize this as a transnational cleavage between winners of globalization—typically highly educated and mobile individuals who support openness and international cooperation—and losers of globalization, who feel threatened by economic insecurity or the erosion of national values and seek “cultural or economic shelter” in national citizenship and sovereignty.
In the Palumba data, the highest levels of disagreement appear precisely on issues that require positions on how costs, responsibilities, and authority are allocated across borders. A key division within Gen Z thus emerges along the GAL–TAN axis (Green/Alternative/Libertarian versus Traditional/Authority/National). Issues such as encouraging less meat consumption, reducing air travel, and decriminalizing sex work align with GAL values. In contrast, positions such as promoting Christian values within the EU or rejecting new EU members reflect TAN preferences centered on national and cultural protection.
At the same time, a much stronger consensus is reached on issues rooted in individual rights and humanitarian norms, such as abortion, animal welfare, or euthanasia. This distinction suggests that Gen Z polarization does not stem from a clash over fundamental values but from competing visions of governance in a globalized world.
The generational divide within Gen Z is thus not a right-left division but rather an openness-closure controversy. This process creates new political coalitions, challenges established parties, and reverses the idea of a monolithic generation.
