Generational Imprinting: How Political Events Shape Cohorts

How, and for whom, do political events translate into enduring political change? This article proposes a two-stage model of generational imprinting, where identity-congenial cues determine whether individuals update their political attitudes in the immediate aftermath of a political shock, while life-course position determines whether that change is persistent or not. Focusing on the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests as a quasi-natural experiment, I test this model by analyzing attitudes toward U.S. law enforcement among non-Hispanic White Americans using three surveys that collectively span from 2016 to 2022. I show that Democrats and Independents became strongly unfavorable toward law enforcement in response to the killing of George Floyd. However, these effects persisted among younger individuals, while fading among older individuals, leading to cohort-led polarization. This article thus integrates two classic—though largely partial—theories of political learning, providing a framework for understanding how episodic shocks can realign political divides across generations.