literature review of political socialization

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The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior

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2 Political Socialization

M. Kent Jennings is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan.

Published: 02 September 2009
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This article discusses political socialization, focusing on the major turning points and developments in the field. It addresses the issue of the bull and bear markets of political socialization research and looks at the recent renewed interest in the dynamics of socialization. The role of the family as the main agent of socialization is examined as well. The article includes a discussion on the relevant contextual features that attend the socialization process. It concludes with several comments on a few missed opportunities to study the socialization processes and outcomes of pre-adults, as well as possible future fields of research.

The evolution and development of political socialization as a distinct area of scholarship has been recently chronicled and evaluated in several places, though not always under the formal name of political socialization (e.g. Renshon 2003 ; Sapiro 2004 ; Sears and Levy 2003 ). That being the case, I will move fairly quickly into what I see as major turning points and recent developments. First, however, it is important to address the issue of the so‐called bull and bear markets of political socialization research. As shall be demonstrated, we have recently re‐entered the bull market.

It would be a mistake, though, to say that an interest in political socialization disappeared for any great length of time. True, only a few publications devoted explicitly to pre‐adults appeared between the mid‐1970s and the early 1990s. The concepts and findings from earlier research had, however, thoroughly penetrated the discipline of political science and had become embedded in a number of subfields, including public opinion, electoral behavior, political culture, and political movements. Some evidence along those lines comes from an examination of political science journal abstracts, which reveal a fairly steady mention of political socialization at an average rate of nearly twenty per year between 1972 and 1996 (Sapiro 2004) . In addition, there has been a very active research committee on political socialization and education within the International Political Science Association for the past quarter‐century.

That said, there is no question that the pace of scholarly inquiries has increased since the early 1990s. Before turning to that resurgence, I will address the fact that very few inquiries deal with children.

1 The Loss of Childhood

Early work in the United States was based on collecting primary data from school‐age children (e.g. Easton and Dennis 1969 , Greenstein 1965 ). These investigations emphasized the content and progression of political learning over the childhood years. They also noted the positive and relatively benign processes and outcomes of political socialization. Strong inferences were drawn about the systemic consequences of such positive orientations.

Ironically, however, these studies did not set the tone for future research in their focus on pre‐adolescents. Subsequent scholarship has only occasionally dealt with children. Outcroppings have appeared, such as a three‐wave study that did include pre‐teenagers and which demonstrated the remarkable impact of political campaigning on information and partisan crystallization and the important role played by media exposure ( Sears and Valentino 1997 ; Valentino and Sears 1998 ). Even these reports, however, are based on data collected in 1980–1.

Three reasons can be advanced for the virtual disappearance of childhood studies. First, political scientists are not very interested in children. As pithily overstated by Torney‐Purta, “most psychologists have to be convinced that anything happening after age 12 makes a difference, whereas political scientists have to be convinced that anything happening before age 18 makes a difference” (Torney‐Purta 2005, 471, emphasis in the original) . A second reason is that the cohorts represented by the children with such benign views of politics in mid‐century America were the very same ones that manifested dramatic displays of social and political unrest and rebellion a decade later. Rightly or wrongly, some observers took this to mean that the socialization lessons of childhood could be easily undone. Third, and relatedly, replications of the early studies in the wake of critical events in the United States, including the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, revealed how quickly children could alter their views about politics (e.g. Dennis and Webster 1975) .

Sapiro (2004) makes a spirited argument for a return to the study of childhood. She argues that advances in development psychology have challenged the cognitive incompetence arguments, that social categorization and identity processes are now a more central part of our understanding about political socialization and are crucial building blocks for the child, and that emerging consensus on what constitutes political competencies provide normative guidelines for evaluating socialization outcomes for children. Nevertheless, studies of children have been rare. Rather, attention has focused on adolescents, young adults, and beyond. In what follows I take up several developments that have helped fuel a scholarly resurgence in political socialization research in recent years.

2 The Impact of Real World Events

Just as the student protest movement in western countries in the 1960s and early 1970s ushered in a raft of studies highly relevant to the field, 1 so too have external events in the 1980s and 1990s fostered fresh research. Two secular developments have been pivotal.

2.1 Declining Civic Virtue in Western Democracies

One impetus consists of the apparent decline in social capital, civic virtue, and traditional political engagement said to characterize upcoming cohorts in many western societies. Prompted by such trends, a variety of institutions and researchers have turned to the question of the education and training of the young. Most of these projects deal with adolescents and young adults.

The research can be divided into three main areas, one of which is the formal curriculum. As a corrective to the early conclusion by Langton and Jennings (1968) regarding the inefficacy of exposure to civics courses in the United States, Niemi and Junn (1998) concluded that the impact was considerably more than trivial. 2 Other research indicates that particular styles of teaching about government and politics are more effective than others (e.g. Andolina et al. 2003) , findings also reported in an international study (Torney‐Purta 2002) . By their very nature, most such inquiries are short term panels or one‐time assessments, thus limiting a longer‐term evaluation.

A second line of research concerns the impact of participating in extracurricular and voluntary associations during adolescence. Here the evidence is more convincing, partly due to the availability of better data. Cross‐sectional surveys (Andolina et al. 2003) short‐term panel studies ( Campbell 2006 ; Smith 1999 ), long‐term panels ( Stolle and Hooghe 2004 ; Jennings and Stoker 2004 ) and retrospective accounts (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995, 416–60) show the salutary consequences of student government and voluntary association membership on adult levels of civic engagement and political participation. Adolescents engaging in such activities seem to acquire skills and predispositions that yield returns, which may vary by time and site, as they wend their way through life.

Community service programs (usually at the secondary school level) that in various ways combine community outreach with classroom instruction constitute a third focus of research. The rationale for such programs is to develop participatory skills and an interest and concern about the general welfare. Such programs encompass a wide range by site, duration, and format, and some are much more politically charged than others. Early evaluations of such programs produced mixed results (Galston 2001) , partly because of weak study designs. More carefully designed recent studies are more promising. One such inquiry employed a quasi‐experimental approach and demonstrated that high school students who were required to serve but had initially been less inclined to do so became more likely than others to contemplate future political engagement and also became more interested in politics and increased their understanding thereof (Metz and Youniss 2005) . A large cross‐sectional study of American high schoolers revealed widely varying practices and that service appeared to increase their levels of political interest, knowledge, and skills but had little impact on political tolerance (Niemi, Hepburn, and Chapman 2000) .

2.2 A Changing World Order

A second development consists of the Cold War winding down coupled with the emergence of transitional and new democracies around the globe. A changing world order has provided a natural laboratory for examining the processes and outcomes of political socialization. Perhaps equally important from a research standpoint, the opening up of these societies has also made it politically and practically possible to undertake relevant research.

These events have often led to studies of efforts by the new regimes to instill in pre‐adults, especially via the educational system, the norms of democracy and, in some instances, marketplace economics (Slomczynski and Shabad 1998) . Well‐designed research in such disparate settings as post‐apartheid South Africa (Finkel and Ernst 2005) , post‐Communist Poland (Slomczynski and Shabad 1998) , democratizing Argentina (Morduchowicz et al. 1996) , and recovering Bosnia and Herzegovina (Soule 2003) point toward the ability of a carefully constructed and seriously implemented civics curriculum to elevate levels of political comprehension and, somewhat less so, a variety of democratic values. A survey of three established and four transitioning democracies revealed moderate to high rates of volunteer work, especially among females, although the impact of such work on feelings of civic commitment ranged from nil to substantial and varied according to gender (Flanagan et al. 1998) .

A changing world order has also led to investigations of basic political norms and their correlates in a number of diverse settings. For example, Finchilescu and Dawes (1998) portrayed the differential responses of adolescents to regime change in South Africa according to race/ethnicity, age, and location. A survey of high schoolers in Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic revealed gender, age, and country differences in perceptions of economic disparity and the value of individual initiative (Macek et al. 1998) .

Although not necessarily associated with a changing world order, studies of the impact of particular and ongoing events have also made a mark. Included here are studies of Catholic and Protestant children in strife‐torn Northern Ireland (e.g. Whyte 1998) . Israeli adolescent responses to the Rabin assassination and terror attacks revealed differences according to political orientation, gender, and to the events themselves (Raviv et al. 2000) . An unusual project uncovered substantial links between stressful political life events and psychological distress among South African adolescents, regardless of race and also among Israeli and Palestinian youth (Slone, Kaminer, and Durrheim 2000) . Using intensive research methods, Coles (1986) paints poignant portraits of children trying to cope with stressful situations in a number of countries.

3 Renewed Interest in the Dynamics of Socialization

As noted earlier the question of persistence seemed to bedevil the study of children, though surely in part because of the cognitive and experiential limitations of childhood. Partly in reaction to that quandary the focus of most socialization inquiries shifted to what happens in the adolescent and young adulthood years and to how that plays out over time. Such a shift rests to some degree on the platform of the impressionable years model of political learning, which posits considerable fluctuation in political orientations during the adolescent and young adult years, followed by a period of modest to strong crystallization, and then by relative stability from thereon. 3 While the model thus postulates persistence and the possible emergence of Mannheim‐like generations and generation units (Mannheim 1927) , it by no means excludes the working of subsequent life cycle and widespread period effects.

Expanding and richer databases have helped promote the renewed interest in the dynamics of socialization. Panel studies that begin prior to adulthood and track people over an extended period of time are ideal for assessing these models and for tracing the continuities and discontinuities in political orientations. Such projects are inherently difficult. Two very long‐term American studies of small, select populations, most notably the Bennington College project that began in the 1930s (Alwin, Cohen, and Newcomb 1991) , and the Terman gifted children project that began in the 1940s (Sears and Funk 1999) continue to be mined even as the participants fade from view. Both inquiries support the impressionable years model and reveal the kinds of orientations that are likely to persist and, equally significant, how they are applied in later life.

A third long‐term project in the United States with broader coverage is the four‐wave multi‐generation “student‐parent socialization project,” which has at its core a national sample of the 1965 class of high seniors. Results bearing on dynamics from this study support the formative years hypothesis and also help reveal how orientations acquired during those years have fed into the increasing degree of partisan polarization in the American public (Jennings and Stoker 2005) . Other results from that project show the impact of early‐acquired civic norms on subsequent voting rates (Campbell 2006) , the importance of social class stability in affecting political participation (Walsh, Jennings, and Stoker 2004) , the durability of protesters as a generation unit (Jennings 2002) , and how marriage can affect behaviors and attitudes brought into the marriage ( Stoker and Jennings 1995 , 2005 ).

Short‐term panel data sets are becoming more frequent, as noted in the earlier citation of Smith (1999) . Illustratively, as part of a survey of xenophobia among seventh to tenth graders in East and West Berlin, Boehnkje, Hagen, and Hefler (1998) found higher levels in the later years and among East Berliners and those not in the university bound track. Another German study uncovered four different types of development in political orientations over a seven‐year period (Krampen 2000) . A survey of Dutch adolescents and young adults indicated that the relationship between moral reasoning and attitudes about political cultural issues increased with age and education (Raaijmakers, Verbogt, and Vollebergh 1998) . Working with American data based on two‐year panel periods Campbell (2006 , ch. 6 ) demonstrated that volunteering while in high school predicts volunteering and voting turnout, though not more demanding political activities, in young adulthood.

Short and long‐term panel studies, while invaluable, will probably continue to be relatively infrequent. Another data source for capturing dynamic aspects of political socialization will, on the other hand, continue to expand. Replicated surveys of youthful samples, such as the Monitoring the Future project in the United States, will provide grist for the mill of replacement cohort analysis (e.g. Rahn and Transue 1998) . Such studies obviously do not permit tracing out the long‐term pathways of cohorts, whereas replicated studies of adult cross‐section samples do. Although longitudinal data of this sort have been available for some time, the passage of time has resulted in an impressive collection data sets in many countries. Here I refer to such projects as ongoing national election studies, General Social Surveys, regional “barometer” surveys, and the World Values Surveys.

Extended longitudinal surveys permit such diverse projects as determining the cross‐national generational basis of value change (e.g. Abramson and Inglehart 1995) , identifying the lingering generational differences in appraisals of new and old regimes in post‐Soviet Russia (Mishler and Rose 2005) and East Germany (Finkel, Humphries, and Opp 2001) , charting the gradual rather than abrupt changes prompted by cohort replacement in the Netherlands (van den Broek 1999) , whether the American cohorts coming of age in the 1960s constitute a distinctive political generation (Davis 2004) , and the seeming uniqueness of America's long civic generation (Putnam 2000) . Investigations of this sort implicitly or explicitly employ the impressionable years model of political socialization.

Although longitudinal data are optimal for observing possible generation (and other) effects, the use of clever designs, novel instrumentation, and deep substantive knowledge as applied to one‐shot surveys can also be productive. Tessler, Konold, and Reif (2004) , for example, capitalize on the discrete historical eras of Algeria to show the singularity of one era in shaping political views. Verba, Schlozman, and Burns (2005) demonstrate that African‐Americans coming of age during the civil rights movement recalled a more politically stimulating home environment than did other African‐Americans and also went on to record higher levels of political participation.

In a quite different vein, the possible persistence of orientations derived from the impressionable years has also been studied from the standpoint of collective memories. Adult survey respondents in a wide range of countries have been asked to recall and reflect upon significant national events within the past half‐century. Their answers proved to reflect disproportionately the events that occurred during their adolescent to young adulthood years (e.g. Jennings and Zhang 2005 ; Schuman, Akiyama, and Knäuper 1998 ; Schuman and Rodgers 2004 ; and Schuman, Vinitzky, and Vindour 2003 ). Thus long after the event itself, the imprint remains, a critical test of the impressionable years thesis.

4 A New Emphasis on Contextual Effects

From the outset the study of political socialization has been dominated by sample survey methodology, using either fixed or more flexible instrumentation. Partly because survey research has been the method of choice, research attention has typically focused on individuals and their attributes as units of analysis. More recently there has been a decided turn toward building in the relevant contextual features that attend the socialization process. In doing so, socialization inquiries are joining a growing stream of political behavior research.

4.1 Within‐country Studies

The theoretical and substantive importance of contextual features in the political socialization process has been recognized from the outset of systematic study. Nevertheless, most of the early survey work devoted specifically to pre‐adults paid little attention to larger contextual effects. That situation is changing. Illustratively, Conover and Searing (2000) have engaged in intensive studies of a small number of vividly contrasting secondary school communities in the United States (and Great Britain). Young adolescents constitute the focus of the analysis, but information about their context is generated by interviews with their parents, teachers, and community leaders, and ordinary citizens, and observational and aggregate level data, thus providing rich contextual information. Based on their American study, they concluded that civic engagement and civic education were more closely tied to the practice of citizenship in certain types of communities than others.

Small‐scale studies such as the one just described provide an intimate, process‐oriented look at contextual effects, but are limited in terms of generalization. They also suffer from an inability to specify the effects of particular contextual levels over and above or interacting with individual characteristics of those being socialized. Political socialization inquiries have recently begun to employ multi‐level models in an effort to specify and understand the contribution of contextual features. Multi‐level modeling is often preferred with nested designs, frequently present in socialization studies, because the observations at different levels are not independent.

Two recent reports of adolescents in the United States exemplify the trend. Both move beyond using individual student and familial characteristics as determinants of socialization outcomes by employing features of the communities and schools in which the students are “nested.” One study utilized census and electoral data to characterize the school catchment areas and hence the sociopolitical contexts in which the students lived (Gimpel, Lay, and Schuknecht 2003) . Their results indicate that sociopolitical diversity elevated information holding and participation while homogeneous and uncompetitive environments dampened various indicators of civic engagement. Another conclusion is that the local partisan context has more impact on adolescents in the minority than those in the majority party (Gimpel and Lay 2005) .

A second report, based on a variety of American cross‐sectional and panel surveys, tested two theories of voting motivation—to protect one's interests or to fulfill a sense of duty (Campbell 2006) . Again, community and school contextual features are built into the analysis and treated in a multi‐level fashion. A major conclusion is that more homogeneous secondary school environments appeared to foster anticipated and actual participation based on a sense of civic duty whereas more heterogeneous contexts encouraged participation based on more instrumental goals.

As noted earlier, the accumulation of extended timed series survey data has encouraged the application of socialization perspectives to the longitudinal analysis of birth cohorts. An analytic problem here is that the passage of time is an aggregate, not individual‐level datum. In a strong sense, time constitutes a context and a different analytic level. That being so, it is argued that multi‐level models should be used rather than conventional multivariate approaches such as ordinary least squares regression.

In one of the first applications of this reasoning, Mishler and Rose (2005) analyze fourteen waves of the New Russia Barometer surveys conducted between 1992 and 2005. The impact of time (qua secular change or period effects), which was quite significant in their report, is clearly delineated by applying multi‐level modeling. They use this and other results from the study to advance a thesis dubbed a lifetime learning model. This model represents a melding of cultural theory, which is heavily laced with pre‐adult socialization processes, and institutionalist theory, which argues for contemporaneous learning and adaptability by adults as they respond to changing circumstances. Given the ever‐expanding base of country‐specific longitudinal surveys, it seems very likely that time will be more formally treated as a context and that multi‐level models will be used in tracing out generation, life cycle, and historical effects as part of the larger political socialization project.

4.2 Cross‐national Studies

By their very nature cross‐national investigations lend themselves to searching for contextual effects with respect to political socialization. Indeed, the very concept of a civic culture in Almond and Verba's classic work (1963) was predicated in part on the existence of different socialization contexts across their five‐nation study. Until recently, such efforts have been confined to a small number of countries.

Perhaps the most systematic efforts to assess contextual effects in small N inquiries are the attempts to assess the impact of party systems on the transmission of partisanship and political ideology from parent to child. 4 Working with parent–child pair data from a number of countries and responding in part to the earlier work by Converse and Dupeux (1962) , Percheron and Jennings (1981) argued that some party systems facilitated the transmission of a general left–right ideology in addition to or instead of attachment to particular parties. Subsequently, Westholm and Niemi (1992) amended this proposal by showing that there were both direct and indirect effects of parental partisanship and ideology and that these varied systematically with the nature of the party system. More recently, Ventura (2001) added an Israeli data set to the mix and made a case for the political bloc as the subject of transmission in Israel, and Nieuwbeerta and Wittebrood (1995) noted the complications afforded by the presence of the strong and diverse Dutch multi‐party system. In all these instances, substantial knowledge about the context provided by the party system helped in understanding the magnitude and nature of parent to child transmission.

As with the single country studies, more advanced statistical techniques for analyzing the impact of context are also beginning to emerge in cross‐national studies. Currently, the best prospects for comparative multi‐level modeling as applied to pre‐adults come from the IEA Civic Education Study, conducted under the auspices of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. This project consists of self‐administered questionnaire data, and auxiliary information about the schools and teachers, gathered from around 90,000 young adolescents in twenty‐eight countries and about 50,000 somewhat older ones in twelve countries (Torney‐Purta et al. 2001) . The clustering of student respondents by civic education classroom within each sampled school lends itself to multi‐level modeling at the classroom, school, and country level. Multi‐level analysis based on this project is just now beginning to appear. 5

A more plentiful and growing source of data for large N assessments of contextual effects rests in the substantial number of longitudinal, cross‐national studies of adult populations. As noted earlier, these replications are particularly, though not solely, important from a socialization perspective in terms of demonstrating cohort effects, whether these be due to compositional changes or to “experiential” processes of a Mannheimian sort. Depending upon the nesting properties of the research design, there may be one or more contextual levels. By now there are a sizeable number of such projects in various stages of longitudinality and containing varying amounts of comparable measures.

5 Revisiting the Role of the Family

From the earliest scholarly inquiries on through to the present time the role of the family as a prime agent of socialization has occupied an important place in the literature. By inference it was assumed that the family, mainly parents, played a predominant role given the child's early and prolonged exposure to the family on the one hand, and the relative degree of continuity observed in political cultures on the other hand. Such reasoning was predicated on the basis of social learning theories (direct modeling, cue giving, and reinforcement processes within the family) or the impact of factors associated with various social and economic characteristics of the family—the social milieu pathway (Dalton 1982) .

It was not until the advent of study designs that included independent information from both parents and children that more specific tests of propositions about the reproduction of parental political characteristics in their offspring could be conducted. As noted in the preceding section, many of these studies continue to focus on partisanship and ideology and have enriched our understanding of parental influence. In that respect social learning in the form of the direct transmission model seems to work reasonably well and varies in rather predictable ways according to systemic characteristics. With respect to a number of other orientations, the model often proved to be wanting in early studies (e.g. Allerbeck, Jennings, and Rosenmayr 1979 ; Jennings and Niemi 1968 ), and thereby generated some skepticism about direct parental influence. More nuanced assessments have demonstrated, however, that topic salience and perceptual accuracy enhance remarkably the likelihood of reproductive fidelity (e.g. Tedin 1974 ; Westholm 1999 ) and that taking measurement error into account also increases the similarity between parent and child (Dalton 1980) . It also turns out that the transmission model tends to be generally more robust than a model using family social traits as predictors of offspring political traits ( Glass, Bengston, and Dunham 1986 ; Jennings 1984 ; and US Department of Education 1999, 45–56 ).

Two intriguing questions about parental influence require complex designs: how enduring is parental influence and are there differences in parental impact across generations? These questions have been addressed using the American long‐term, multi‐generation “student‐parent socialization project” initially based on a national sample of high school seniors and their parents (Jennings, Stoker, and Bowers 2005) . As for the first question, parent–child correspondence is at its zenith before the child leaves home, drops substantially as the child moves through young adulthood, and levels off subsequently. One key factor affecting sustained parental impact is parental attitudinal stability on the political topic at hand; another factor is parental politicization level. As for the second question about intergenerational differences in parental influence, the answer is one of continuity. Congruence between the erstwhile high school seniors and their offspring as of 1997 closely matched that between the seniors and their parents in 1965, this being so despite vast changes in the social and political landscape over time.

Family influence continues to be assessed by introducing family socioeconomic and political characteristics into the analysis, most especially in the absence of direct measures of parental characteristics. Thus many of the civic engagement studies referenced above utilize family‐level estimates obtained from youthful respondents either as independent or control variables. The reliability of such respondent reports ranges widely, with more confidence being placed in reports about concrete, objective traits. As Tedin noted some time ago (1976), perceptions about all but the most potent of parental political attitudes are fraught with error.

Cross‐section studies of adults also continue to utilize reports about the family of origin as a way of understanding adult orientations. Illustratively, in one imaginative inquiry Miller and Sears (1986) demonstrated that the continuity of demographic features from the family of origin to one's adult years had a strong bearing on levels of social tolerance. Addressing a traditional topic with a rich data set, Verba, Schlozman, and Burns (2005) showed that more parental education increases the likelihood of later offspring political participation not only by providing a richer political environment in the home but also by enhancing the educational attainments of their offspring which are, in turn, related to participation.

6 Foregone Alternatives and New Opportunities

I close this chapter with a brief comment about what might have been and what might yet be. A missed opportunity concerns the large influx of immigrants into a number of countries over the past few decades. Not only did this present a chance to study the socialization processes and outcomes regarding pre‐adults, but it also represented a unique opportunity to analyze the resocialization of adults. Some relevant work, often flying under the conceptual banner of integration and differentiation, has appeared (e.g. Cain, Kiewiet, and Uhlaner 1991 ; de la Garza et al. 1992 ; Bowlen, Nicholson, and Segura 2006 ). For the most part, however, systematic inquiries with a focus on socialization as such have been lacking. 6 Part of the difficulty is that ordinary probability samples of pre‐adult and adult populations usually do not include enough distinctive immigrant groups for analytic purposes. More purposive sampling schemes such as that employed by Gimpel, Lay, and Schuknecht (2003) are in order. The window of opportunity has shrunk in many places, but ample space remains for innovative research.

A possible new research direction has been recently advanced, one which joins a stream of research linking the social sciences and behavioral genetics. Alford, Funk, and Hibbing (2005) use data from twin studies in the United States to argue that genetics plays a more than trivial role in the construction of political orientations. At this early stage it is difficult to predict the future of this innovation. Still, it brings a provocative addition to the political socialization literature and links the subfield to emergent trends in the discipline.

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I omit that considerable literature due to its dated appearance.

This finding has been undermined by the revelation that the effects appeared predominantly among students currently enrolled in a civics class (Green 2000) .

A competing model, mid‐life stability, is similar except that it predicts a tapering off of stability in the later years.

Some reports emerging from the 28‐nation IEA Civic Education project also take a small N approach (e.g. Torney‐Purta, Barber, and Richardson 2004) .

Campbell (2006 , ch. 5 ) used the United States portion of the project.

Here, as elsewhere, my restriction to the English‐language literature has undoubtedly excluded some pertinent contributions.

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Collaborative learning in politics: creating spaces for political socialization in the classroom

Teaching and Learning: Symposium
Published: 30 July 2020
Volume 20 , pages 413–426, ( 2021 )

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literature review of political socialization

Gloria Martínez-Cousinou 1 ,
Alberto Álvarez-Sotomayor 2 &
Beatriz Tomé-Alonso 1

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This paper analyses changes in attitudes towards politics among the students of a Bachelor of Communication degree program in Spain after applying an educational innovation project including a formal civic education, an open classroom climate and collaborative learning strategies in politics. The effects of the project on the knowledge and interest towards politics of the participants were measured through a mixed methodology. First, a survey was administered both before and after the project was implemented. Second, focus groups were also conducted in both referred moments. The results show an increase in both understanding and having an interest in politics among students. In the context of low levels of formal instruction on politics during secondary school, such as in the Spanish case, these findings show that political disaffection among youth relates to a serious lack of knowledge about politics.

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Swedish students’ everyday school life and teachers’ assessment dilemmas: peer strategies for ameliorating schoolwork for assessment

Co-creation in learning and teaching: the case for a whole-class approach in higher education

The Refined Consensus Model of Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Science Education

Both courses are compulsory (6 ECTS each) in the academic curriculum for the communication degree; thus, students taking the second-year course had previously passed the political science course.

Students’ decisions to participate in the focus groups were made freely; they were previously informed that their participation was independent of their final grade of the course. The information expressed by the students was recorded on the basis of prior and informed consent. To avoid biases and distortions on the information provided by participants, focus groups were conducted by a researcher different to their own instructor.

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Department of International Studies, Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Avda. de las Universidades s/n, 41704, Dos Hermanas, Seville, Spain

Gloria Martínez-Cousinou & Beatriz Tomé-Alonso

Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Córdoba, C/San Alberto Magno, s/n, 14071, Córdoba, Spain

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Martínez-Cousinou, G., Álvarez-Sotomayor, A. & Tomé-Alonso, B. Collaborative learning in politics: creating spaces for political socialization in the classroom. Eur Polit Sci 20 , 413–426 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-020-00281-y

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Published : 30 July 2020

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-020-00281-y

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The Voice of Political Science around the World

Journal | Politics, Culture and Socialization

Publication date: Jan 2011

ISNN: 1866-3427

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The focus of attention is on political socialization processes – including political education, information, persuasion, marketing, or propaganda and their underlying and accompanying motivations - and political socialization structures – including the family, school, mass media, peer groups, social networks, and politics.

Politics, Culture and Socialization publishes new and significant contributions that report on current scientific research, discuss theory and methodology, or review relevant literature. It welcomes the following types of contributions on topics which fall within its aim and scope:

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6.1 Political Socialization: The Ways People Become Political

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Define political socialization.
Describe the main influences on a person’s political socialization.
Analyze the ways social media has affected political socialization.
Discuss the factors that determine which influences will have the greatest impact on a person’s political socialization.

Do you consider yourself to have a political identity? Do you belong to or identify with a political party? Do you have a political ideology, such as conservative, libertarian, liberal, or populist? Are you apolitical (indifferent to politics), or are you deeply engaged in political action? Whatever your answers are, there is a chance—but a rather small one—that you deliberately and thoughtfully made these choices at a single moment by analytically comparing the various alternatives. It’s more likely that your choices gradually emerged over time through a complex combination of environmental and social influences interacting with your own personal biological and psychological makeup.

It is not entirely clear how Greta Thunberg became a climate change activist, for example, although her father Svante was named after his grandfather, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who identified the link between increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and higher global temperatures. 5 She grew up in Sweden, a country with a strong ethic of environmentalism (by some measures, it is ranked as the most environmentally friendly country in the world). 6 She reports learning about climate change by age eight and credits the American student activists who protested gun laws after the Parkland, Florida, school shootings with inspiring her to act. 7

The gradual process of developing values and beliefs, of people becoming who they are as adults, is socialization , and the slow development of who a person becomes as a political being is political socialization . 8 Through political socialization, people develop their political ideology in the broadest sense. This includes not only their values and attitudes regarding the role of citizens and the government, but also regarding issues such as social justice or climate change. Socialization also influences whether a person is likely to have any interest in politics at all.

Political socialization is neither premeditated nor preordained, although there is a growing body of evidence that indicates that there are genetic links to political predispositions. 9 As an infant, you did not choose who you would become as an adult. As you grew, you were subject to a wide variety of forces that shaped your personality. Some of these forces were present in your physical environment, such as your home (Was there lead paint on the walls?), your neighborhood (Was it safe?), 10 and your school (Was it a place you looked forward to going to?). 11 As your physical environment shapes your learning, it also influences your views and attitudes, even if you are unaware of these influences.

The line from your social and physical environment to your political personality may be indirect. If you grew up in a heavily policed neighborhood, attended a deteriorating school, and lacked safe drinking water, your attitudes about government are likely to differ from an otherwise identical individual who lived in a comfortable home with safe drinking water and attended a well-resourced school in an affluent neighborhood. Humans are complicated, and it would be unwise to conclude that all those growing up in privilege are identically socialized or that those raised lacking such privilege all have the same political personalities. Your social and physical environments do not determine your political personality, but they can have an important influence.

The Role of the Family

The family is usually considered the most important influence on both a person’s overall socialization and their political socialization . Families profoundly affect people’s views about religion, work, and education. 12 People gradually develop these preferences, attitudes, and behaviors as they grow from infants to adolescents to adults. The impact families have on people’s lives does not vanish when they become adults. It is likely to persist over their lifetimes. The influence need not always flow from the parents to the child. Greta Thunberg ’s activism led her parents to reconsider their own environmental attitudes, and research suggests that children often affect their parents’ views on the environment. 13

Your family is likely to exert a substantial influence on your political views. 14 In some political settings in which a child’s identity is defined by religion, ethnicity, and place, their political views may seem almost predetermined. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, the three main groups tend to be divided by ethnicity and religion, which largely define their political affiliations. Ethnic Bosniaks tend to be Muslim, Croats tend to be Roman Catholic, and Serbs are mainly Orthodox Christians. These differing ethnic and religious groups largely determine individuals’ political affiliations: there is little political intermingling across ethnic and religious lines. 15

In most places around the world, if parents raise their children in a particular religious faith, those children are more likely than not to adopt that faith as they become adults (or, if the children are raised in no faith, they are less likely to have religious connections as adults). 16 The same is true for almost any other important facet of life: social attitudes, beliefs about the role of the family, and yes, political beliefs. This is not to say that beliefs are automatically transmitted: young people have agency and may accept, reject, or simply question what their parents believe. 17

THE CHANGING POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

The changing family.

Families play a key role in political socialization, and family structure is evolving in different ways around the world. One fundamental change is family size; fertility rates have dropped in virtually every country in the past century.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides an extreme example. When the PRC was established in 1949, the government encouraged families to have children to create additional workers, and by the 1960s the typical Chinese family had six children. At that point political leaders became worried about rapid population growth, and so in 1980 they instituted a one-child policy strictly enforced through a combination of benefits and often-harsh penalties. The policy dramatically slowed population growth, and it substantially increased both the age of and the percentage of males in the population. Under this policy, a cultural preference for male children led to sex-selective abortions and female infanticide. Believing that they had gone too far, the Chinese government lifted the one-child policy in 2016. 18

What It Was Like to Grow Up under China’s One-Child Policy

In this TED talk, Chinese filmmaker Nanfu Wang describes her experiences as a child growing up under China’s one-child policy and as an adult making a documentary about people’s experiences under the policy.

Family structure involves not only how many children are in a family, but where they live when they effectively become adults. As of 2016, a higher percentage (52 percent) of 18-to-29-year-olds in the United States were living with their parents than at any time since 1900. 19 Among wealthy countries, the percentage of 15-to-29 year-olds living with their parents varied from about 80 percent in Italy to 30 percent in Canada. 20

Given what we already know about how family members can influence each other’s political attitudes and beliefs, it will be interesting to see how these changing family structures and living conditions impact political socialization .

Your parents’ political leanings and your broader family environment affect your political views. For example, who is expected to take responsibility for caring for parents as they age varies from country to country. In China, caring for one’s parents is a sacred duty; in Norway, it is more often seen as an obligation of the government. Germans and Italians are more than twice as likely as Americans to say that the government, rather than the family, has the main responsibility for caring for the elderly. 21

Note that these statements, like other generalizations, are not true for every person in every circumstance everywhere. Some children of devout worshippers become atheists, some people raised as capitalists become communists, and some of the children of political, social, and cultural liberals become ardent conservatives.

When making these generalizations, this chapter uses words like “generally” or “tend” to suggest that the statements are accurate for the bulk of the group or characteristic being discussed. For example, in the United States, about 7 out of 10 teenagers have political ideologies and partisan affiliations similar to their parents: liberal teens tend to have liberal parents, and conservative youth generally have conservative parents. Still, about one-third of US teenagers adopt different political ideologies from those they were raised with. 22

Bernie Sanders Says His Childhood Shaped His Political Views

In a 60 Minutes interview, Senator Bernie Sanders describes how his childhood experiences helped shape his political views.

The identities of a young person’s parent(s) affect that person’s political socialization . If parental engagement in politics is high and party identification is strong, children are more likely to adopt those attitudes and behaviors than if parental political engagement is low and their partisanship indifferent. 23 Family structure—whether a child is living with two parents or a single parent, and whether parents are married, divorced, or cohabitating, for example—raises complex issues for political socialization that are not well understood. 24 Moreover, the impact of the family on socialization is not limited to children. Family dynamics also impact the political socialization of adults. 25

Your living situation growing up largely determines what influences you will encounter as you mature. Your school can influence your political socialization, as different schools have differing teaching philosophies, student bodies, and political activities. Likewise, your place of worship may have a profound influence on who you become. When you are young, your parents or guardians probably choose your school and religion; however, as people grow older, many of them spend less time with their parents or guardians and more time with their peers, including friends at school, work, community, and play. You may change your language, clothing, and interests to fit in with those in your group. And as you grow older, you are increasingly able to make your own decisions.

It is less clear whether your peers will have a lasting impact on your political socialization. Like many things when you are growing up, your choice of peers is not entirely in your control. Most children don't pick where they live and where they attend primary school, and those two factors play a big part in determining the pool of people from which individuals can choose friends. In short, your parents’ life circumstances and choices shape who your peers are likely to be. Still, context is important. Before the advent of social media, parental decisions would almost entirely determine your pool of peers. Now, given internet access, young people can find their peer groups virtually anywhere.

Increasingly, young people rely on social media to learn about the world and connect with others. Political scientists are still trying to decipher what this means for political socialization. In the past, a young person’s peers tended to be local: other members of the clan, the village, or the church. Today, a young person’s peers can be almost anywhere in the world, assuming they understand the same language, and thus young people (and adults) can more easily choose their peers based on common interests and beliefs than they could in the past. To the extent that young people, and indeed all individuals, can choose their social networks rather than being placed in them by virtue of their location, it is more likely that peer networks will reinforce existing beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors rather than change them. The ability of individuals to choose their social networks leads to “echo chambers,” which Chapter 12: The Media will examine further.

Other Affiliations

Your family and peers greatly influence your political opinions, attitudes, values, and behaviors, but there are other important influences. How much these other influences affect a person’s political socialization depends, in part, on how important they are to the person’s identity and daily life.

What Does Being Indigenous Mean?

In this clip, Indigenous people in Canada explain what it means to them to be Indigenous.

Consider ethnicity. The dominant ethnic group within a country—the White British within the United Kingdom, for example—may not perceive their ethnicity as having much of an influence on their political socialization, but its impact is likely to be profound. Members of ethnic majorities may be more likely to assume that politics and government should favor their interests as a matter of course because they may (naively) believe that what is good for them is good for everyone. Ethnic minorities, in contrast, may be socialized to feel the sting of discrimination and to view the government as no friend. One’s ethnic identity is likely to be more salient if that identity signifies one as an outsider. 26

If you were raised in a devout family, that family’s religion may have an important influence on your political socialization. 27 In the United States, for example, those individuals identifying as evangelicals are much more likely than the rest of the population to favor socially conservative public policies such as prohibiting same sex marriage or curtailing abortion rights, and they are much more likely to support the Republican Party. At the opposite end of the spectrum, those raised as atheists are more likely to believe that governmental policy should not be based on religious principles. 28

Gender roles and gender identification can influence an individual’s political socialization. Socialization into “traditional” gender roles may discourage women from developing interest or participating in politics, while in countries with women in leadership positions, young women may be socialized to become more politically aware and active. 29 The impact of gender identification and sexual orientation on political socialization is not well understood, but it seems likely that the greater the importance a person places on these attributes and the more intense the formative experiences they have regarding these attributes, the greater the influence these attributes will have on that person’s political socialization. 30

Even though young people spend a lot of time in school, the impact of schooling on political socialization appears to be modest. Why? The schools children attend often reflect the choices and environment of their parents, so they have little independent influence on socialization. For example, if you come from a religious home and your family has the means to do so, your parents might choose to send you to religious school; this reinforces the influence of the family’s religion on socialization. More broadly, the schools young people attend are likely to reflect the conditions and values that already exist in their environment.

People are socialized as individuals, and they are socialized in groups, including their family, peers, and others in their social environments. As people are socialized, they become part of larger groupings of individuals with common characteristics. The next sections discuss these larger groupings.

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The focus of scientific discussion at this point shifted from early political socialization to more in-depth studies of aging. Especially Marsh's (1971) critique of the early studies of political socialization changed the understanding of "what, when and how people learn political behaviour and attitudes" (Hepburn 1995, 5). Marsh ...
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the process of political socialization, and it is an activity in which all humans participate, in some manner, from a very young age (Ditto & Lopez, 1992). Although the current study focuses on attitudes and perceptions of young voters, in essence effects derived from this socialization, a literature review on the topic of political
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The continuous and direct study of political socialization began in the middle to late 1950s under the impetus of three more or less simultaneous developments. The first was Hyman's book Political Socialization (1959), which reviewed much of the scattered literature that existed up to that point, and gave the subdiscipline a name.
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of Political Values from Parent to Child," American Political Science Review, 62 (March 1968), 169-84; and Kenneth P. Langton, "Peer Groups and Schools and the Political Socialization Process," American Political Science Review, 61 (September 1967), 751-58. 4For a review of much of the literature and research in political socialization see Jack ...
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6.1 Political Socialization: The Ways People Become Political
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International Journal of Social Science and Education Research www.socialsciencejournals.net Online ISSN: 2664-9853, Print ISSN: 2664-9845, Impact Factor: RJIF 5.42 Received: 20-02-2021, Accepted: 05-03-2021, Published: 25-03-2021 Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021, Page No. 11-15. A review of research on mass media and political socialization.
Citizenship Education for Political Engagement: A Systematic Review of
Citizenship Education could play a pivotal role in creating a fairer society in which all groups participate equally in the political progress. But strong causal evidence of which educational techniques work best to create political engagement is lacking. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of controlled trials within the field based on transparent search protocols. It finds ...