Our parents’ generation inherited a fairly predictable political map. If you were working class, you were more likely to vote for Social Democrats, Labor parties, or Socialists. If you were a business owner, you tended lean to conservative. Political identities were closely tied to social identities, and party systems reflected these stable social divisions. Political scientists described these alignments as “cleavages”: long-standing lines of conflict, especially around class and religion, that linked social background to party choice. Voters tended to adopt coherent packages of beliefs about the economy, society, and the state. In that world, politics worked like an album with a coherent set of tracks that came together. Voting for the same party election after election, therefore, was common because political beliefs came bundled together in recognizable ideological packages.
For Europe’s Generation Z, that is, those born between 1995 and 2009, this map looks increasingly different. This is not because young people have become apolitical or incoherent. It is because the institutions that used to bundle political identities have weakened, while the issues that structure politics have multiplied. The result is a generation whose political beliefs are less easily located on a single left-right scale. Instead, they are assembled across multiple issue dimensions. In other words, the political preferences of youth today resemble a curated playlist: a mix of positions chosen issue by issue rather than a single ideological bundle.
From stable party identities to issue-based alignments
Evidence for this shift is visible in survey data. According to Eurobarometer, young voters show significantly weaker attachment to political parties than older generations.2 Only 22 percent of young voters say they usually vote for the same party, compared with 41 percent of voters overall. Instead of partisan loyalty, many young voters choose the party that best matches their views on specific issues at the time of the election. In practice, this means that a young European voter might support ambitious climate policy while also favoring stronger industrial protection. While this might seem contradictory at first glance, it suggests that Gen Z might combine personal issue priorities across different policy domains, much like listening to both indie rock and hip-hop on the same playlist.
However, this does not mean ideology has disappeared entirely. Data from Palumba show that political attitudes still form recognizable clusters in some areas. Issues related to cultural liberalism, such as abortion rights or LGBTQ rights, tend to move together. People who support one of these positions are also likely to support the others. Yet other issues behave very differently. Positions on questions such as sending weapons to Ukraine or protecting European industries show extremely weak correlations with other political views. Knowing where someone stands on one of these topics tells us very little about their broader ideological orientation.
This pattern suggests that contemporary political belief systems are multidimensional. Some issues still cluster into ideological camps, while others cut across them. As a result, voters can combine positions that historically belonged to different political traditions. This phenomenon is not entirely new. Political scientist Philip Converse argued in his influential 1964 essay The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics that most citizens do not hold tightly organized ideological belief systems. Instead, they often hold attitudes that are only loosely connected. They may support redistribution in one area and oppose intervention in another without seeing a contradiction. Converse called this low ideological “constraint”: beliefs are only loosely connected through overarching ideological frameworks.
How digital media reshapes political identity
Why might this be especially visible among younger voters? Part of the explanation may lie in the changing information environment. Converse argued that voters often rely on cues from their social environment, most notably parties, media, and opinion leaders, to structure their political views. For much of the twentieth century these cues came from shared information spaces: newspapers, television broadcasts, and party organizations. Large segments of society consumed similar information framed in similar ways.
For Gen Z, however, the information landscape looks fundamentally different. Young Europeans increasingly encounter politics through social media platforms, where algorithms personalize the information users receive. According to the Allianz Foundation Next Generation Study, 42% of young Europeans use social media to stay informed about political and social issues. While there is country-specific variation in media consumption, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube play a central role in news consumption for youth across Europe. Instead of a shared media environment, Gen Z navigates highly individualized streams of political content shaped by their networks and past interactions. The transformation resembles the evolution of music consumption. A generation ago, most people listened to the same songs playing on the radio charts. Today, streaming platforms generate personalized playlists based on each listener’s preferences.
The claim is not that social media completely determines belief. However, digital media make it easier for political cues to be distributed through peer networks, identity communities, and issue-based subcultures. That can strengthen coherence within a cause, such as climate, trans rights, or anti-corruption, while leaving other domains, including defense and industrial policy, less ideologically bundled. This is what theories of connective action predict. Bennett and Segerberg describe a personalized, digitally networked politics where communication itself becomes an organizing principle, enabling collective mobilization without the same organizational infrastructure of classic party politics.
The rise of political subcultures
That shift might also be driven by how young Europeans engage politically. Traditional party structures appear to be losing traction. Parties used to function like albums, bundling different tracks into one recognizable whole and asked voters to buy into the full package. For many young people, that model no longer seems to fit. Across countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain, only about 22 percent of young people report having supported a political party in any form beyond voting. Yet, that does not mean that political engagement is disappearing. Around 38 percent of youth, in contrast, report having participated in protests or demonstrations. Young Europeans, consequently, are more likely to mobilize around specific issues than to commit to long-term party affiliation. The issues that most frequently motivate action include human rights, education, and climate change.
At the same time, many young people are embedded in online communities that revolve around shared political concerns. Almost half of Gen Z in Europe cultivates online networks built around political identities, whether through activism, content creation, or discussion forums. These networks vary across countries, with particularly strong patterns of community-building in places like Poland and growing forms of digital activism in Germany. Political scientists sometimes refer to these patterns as “issue publics”: groups of citizens who organize politically around specific topics rather than broad ideological identities.
This might help explain why young people may appear volatile from one election to the next. Their switching is not necessarily evidence of superficiality or disengagement. It may instead reflect a different logic of representation: they are not moving randomly, but reassessing which political actor best matches the particular combination of issues they care about most at a given moment. In that sense, issue-based politics can make participation more fluid, but it can also make party competition less stable.
What are the consequences of playlist politics?
The old political map has not disappeared entirely, but it no longer tells the whole story. For Europe’s Generation Z, some issues still belong to familiar ideological genres, while others are mixed and matched across older political boundaries. That is why their politics can seem harder to classify, and why party systems built on stable bundles increasingly struggle to contain them. What has changed is not whether young people care about politics, but how they compose it. Their political identities are less like fixed albums and more like playlists: still meaningful, still structured, but more selective, more personalized, and more open to rearrangement. Lastly, the question is whether political institutions can adapt to a generation that no longer listens by album.
