Politik Indonesia: Indonesian Political Science Review, 7 (3), December 2022, pp. 331-345 ISSN 2477-8060 (print), ISSN 2503-4456 (online) DOI: 10.15294/ipsr.v7i3.39748 © 2022 Politik Indonesia: Indonesian Political Science Review Received October 27, 2022; Revised November 19, 2022; Accepted December 19, 2022 Youth Out of Touch? Early Assessment of Millennial Leaders’ Performance on Human Capital Development at Indonesian Districts Nur Hidayat Sardini, Universitas Diponegoro, Indonesia Bangkit Aditya Wiryawan, Universitas Diponegoro, Indonesia* Rina Martini, Universitas Diponegoro, Indonesia Abstract Starting in the second round of local election, participation of millenials has been increasing. The term refers to the young demographic cohort born between 1980 and 2002, known to have distinct characteristics to the previous generations. This study is the first to assess Indonesian millennial leaders’ performance at the country level. We gathered seventeen cases of elected millennial district heads between 2010 and 2017 and making an early observation of their impact on human capital development. Simplified difference-in-difference estimation method is applied using province average as the control group. Results show that following the winning of the millennial leaders there is a diverging trend of Human Development Index score at 0.03 and 0.07 in the first and second year, consecutively, before started converging around the third and fourth year. Lacking leadership skills and experiences, that may also be perpetrated by generational gap, are among the contributing factors to the problem. We further find that leaders not affiliated with political dynasty fare better. We check the robustness of our result using poverty data and further find that millennial leaders are also under- perform in combating poverty. This early assessment would benefit from further heterogeneity analyses as well as narrowing the control group, which is our recommendation for future research. Keywords: Generation Y, Millennials, local politics, Direct election, Human capital INTRODUCTION Three decades following the birth wave of Generation Y, a term that is given to a group of demographic cohort born in 1980 or after and before the early 2000s (Foot & Stoffman, 1998; Smith & Nichols, 2015; other scholars define this generation as those born either in 1981 or 1982, see among others Howe & Strauss, 2000; Eckleberry-Hunt & Tucciarone, 2011; Dimock, 2019), the now electorally decentralized Indonesian politics are gradually filled with this distinct demographic group. Currently the millennials, as they are more popularly known, constitute the largest in terms of adult population (rough estimate from BPS stands at nearly 26%), which also reflects voter size. Political coming of age is one of the main issues for this generation (Fisher, 2018), with the growing tendency of political apathism on one hand and inexperiences on the other hand. We consider that higher quality of participation of this young generation in the Indonesian politics *Correspondence: Undip Tembalang, Semarang 50139 Indonesia. Email: b.wiryawan@lecturer,undip.ac.id.