Moreover, when you look more closely, it’s actually older people who have become more cynical about U.S. democracy.

Much of the hype about millennials comes from a heavily publicized finding from the 2011 World Values Survey. Millennials were less likely to attach a great deal of importance to living in a democracy and were somewhat more likely to embrace alternatives, such as a strong leader. This finding is limited to the United States and much more modest than originally portrayed.

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So what if we look at more data? Very few surveys in the United States ask similar abstract questions about the value of democracy. But we have a lot of high quality data going back a long time on confidence in actual democratic institutions.

The graph above examines patterns since the early 1970s in whether Americans have “a great deal of confidence, only some confidence or hardly any confidence at all” in the United States Congress. The data come from the high quality General Social Survey.

The percentage of Americans who have “hardly any” confidence in Congress has increased sharply since 2003. There were barely any age differentials for most of the past four decades. Now there is almost a 20 percentage-point gap between the youngest and the oldest generations. And it’s the older generations that have become more cynical.

The graph above looks at confidence in the Federal Executive. Again, it’s older, not younger Americans, who have less confidence in the executive. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. There was no age gap before the 2000s.

I also looked at confidence in nondemocratic institutions, such as the military, and did not find a similar age gap. So it seems that confidence differences are about the functioning of democratic institutions.

The final graph goes back even further in time. It plots averages for a 100-point trust in government scale developed by the American National Election Studies. The scale combines assessments about whether people “trust the federal government to do what is right,” “that the federal government is run by a few interests or for the benefit of all,” “how much the government wastes tax money” and “how many government officials are crooked.”

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The pattern is similar: In 2012 younger people are on average more trusting in the government than older people, although the difference is not that large. By contrast, in earlier surveys there are no age differences of note.

So what does this mean?

Actual unhappiness about the functioning of the government is not the same thing as abstract preferences for democracy over its alternatives. Perhaps young people just haven’t been paying attention. Maybe good democrats (with the lowercase “d”) should be upset about the way the government is functioning. So, millennials’ relative lack of cynicism about U.S. political institution could reflect their apathy.