The notion of lifecycle was first used in the social sciences in the 1930s and remained prominent until the end of the 1960s in political behavior studies, despite its lack of empirical consistency. The basic idea is that stage-specific needs result in the adoption of particular political attitudes. Based largely on Freudian psychodynamic theory, the lifecycle approach has mainly been interested in explaining adolescent rebellion (and, more rarely, the conservatism of the elderly) and attempted to attribute social protest in the 1960s to young people's lifecycle characteristics and needs, and to deep-seated emotional conflicts between youth and adults. In a more structuro-functionalist perspective, lifecycle theory has given birth to a cohort-generational perspective, in which youth unrest is viewed as a product of a rapidly changing social order and unique growing-up experiences that exacerbate age-group relations, and may generate organized protest behaviors. However, contemporary research has found no clear diminution with age in the number of left-oriented attitudes nor any rush to conservatism more generally, as lifecycle theories would suggest. Here, the main result is that social unrest is not causally linked to chronological age and that people do not seem to become more conservative with age.