Persistent gender inequalities in internal political efficacy have traditionally been attributed to gender differences in resources. This article complements the resource model by focusing on how gendered political socialization occurs during citizenship education and how citizenship education might mitigate, reproduce, or intensify inequalities. Based on multilevel models on a 2016 survey dataset (3898 students across 150 schools) of Belgian senior high school students, we show that citizenship education increases internal political efficacy for both male and female students. However, we also find that citizenship education intensifies inequalities since male students gain more from it than female students, especially in schools with a conservative gender role culture. Our results indicate that the influence of citizenship education depends on the gendered school context in which it is offered. In this respect, citizenship education risks intensifying rather than mitigating gender inequalities.

How do immigration attitudes form? Drawing on the political socialization literature, I argue that growing up in a recession causes a lasting increase in anti-immigration attitudes. I delineate two mechanisms that emphasize the negative consequences of recessions for young workers and the anti-immigration narrative that often emerges during economic turmoil. Young adults are particularly vulnerable to these external shocks because they have minimal political experience and are developing their core political attitudes. Support is provided for this argument with evidence from the European Social Survey. An economic shock during young adulthood causes a significant increase in anti-immigration attitudes, a relationship not found for other ages. I find tentative evidence that growing up in a recession has a larger effect on the racial and cultural dimensions of immigration and causes a broader sociotropic response. Results highlight how economic crises affect the socialization of young adults and underscore their lasting political consequences.

Many studies point to the importance of parents in shaping the ethnic and/or political identity of their offspring. However, there is a lack of consensus on the pattern of influence of fathers and mothers in the process of political socialization. While studies in the United States and Japan show the mother to be more influential than the father in transferring political identity to children, studies in China show that both parents have equal importance. We suggest that these differences are owing to different trajectories of modernization. Using Taiwan as a case study and drawing on the theory of compressed modernity, we demonstrate how compressed modernization generates a different shift in the pattern of parental political socialization. We show that before Taiwan's experience of compressed modernization, both parents influenced children's sense of Taiwanese-ness, while only the father was influential after compressed modernization. We also show the significance of a macro-level perspective for explaining differences in the micro-level socialization perspective.

During their early political socialization young people start to recognize their agency as political actors and to develop their political identity. This article presents the findings of a comparative study across different types of youth activism in two cities, Athens and Cologne, which differ in their youth cultures of participation and the opportunities they provide to mobilize. Our data derive from in-depth qualitative interviewing, which is considered to be most fruitful for the exploration of the reasons behind activists' trajectories. We identified three groups of influences: micro-, meso- and macro-level influences, with micro-level influences being most visible in the path of social movement-related activism, meso-level influences being dominant in the path of partisan activism, and macro-level influences prevailing in grassroots activism. Finally, the implications of the differential impact of the studied socio-spatial contexts are critically discussed.

This article investigates how class of origin and intergenerational social mobility impact left-wing party support among new and old core left-wing electorates in the context of post-industrial electoral realignment and occupational transformation. We investigate the remaining legacy of political socialization in class of origin across generations of voters in the UK, Germany and Switzerland. We demonstrate that part of the contemporary middle-class left-wing support is a legacy of socialization under industrial class–party alignments, as many individuals from working-class backgrounds – traditional left-wing constituencies – have a different (post-industrial) class location than their parents. These enduring effects of production worker roots are weaker among younger generations and in more realigned contexts. Our findings imply that exclusively considering respondents' destination class underestimates the relevance of political socialization in class of origin, thereby overestimating electoral realignment. However, these past industrial alignments are currently unparalleled, as newer left-wing constituencies do not (yet) demonstrate similar legacies.

Do economic experiences early in life affect regime support later in life? Effects of recent economic performance on regime support are extensively studied, but lasting effects of individual-level economic experiences across the lifespan remain unexplored. We argue that in democracies and autocracies alike, economic experiences in early adulthood (that is, age eighteen to twenty-eight) are wired into people's memories and become important cues for their democratic support later in life. Having lived in a well-performing economy in a democracy increases democratic support throughout most of people's lives, whereas having lived in a well-performing economy in an autocracy decreases democratic support throughout most of people's lives. Using extensive survey data on support for democracy covering ninety-seven countries from 1994 to 2015, we find support for these propositions, demonstrating that economic experiences in early adulthood, conditional on the regime in place at the time, have strong, robust and lasting effects on democratic support.

Past findings on the connection between class position and political preferences are overwhelmingly derived from cross-sectional studies, which provided a limited basis for inferring causality. This study uses long-term panel data on thousands of British respondents to measure the impact of intra-generational class mobility across a range of political identities and preferences. Upward class mobility leads to small increases in economic conservatism, but party choice, class identity and attitudes to non-economic issues do not change. This updating of economic values is much smaller than cross-sectional differences between classes. These results are consistent with the short-run effects of class mobility operating primarily through a limited economic self-interest mechanism. Beliefs that are plausibly unconnected to economics are unaffected. The overall association between class and a range of identities, opinions and preferences is therefore more likely to be caused by early life experiences and longer-term socialization than by the immediate material interests associated with jobs.

Previous studies have stressed the role of a child's family environment for future political participation. This field of research has, however, overlooked that children within the same family have different experiences depending on their birth order. First-borns spend their first years of life without having to compete over their parents' attention and resources, while their younger siblings are born into potential rivalry. We examine differences in turnout depending on birth order, using unique population-wide individual level register data from Sweden and Norway that enables precise within-family estimates. We consistently find that higher birth order entails lower turnout, and that the turnout differential with respect to birth order is stronger when turnout is lower. The link between birth order and turnout holds when we use data from four other, non-Nordic countries. This birth order effect appears to be partly mediated by socio-economic position and attitudinal predispositions.

Most of what is known regarding political socialization treats parent–child concordance as evidence of transmission. This direct-transmission approach remains agnostic regarding how socialization occurs, whether traits have a role in a child's ability to identify and understand their parent's values or their motivation to adopt their parents’ values. This article advances a perception-adoption approach to unpack these microprocesses of socialization. The authors test their model using three independent studies in the United States that together comprise 4,852 parent–child dyads. They find that the transmission of partisan orientations from parent to child occurs less than half the time, which is qualitatively different from the generally held view. More importantly, the findings provide a greater understanding of how key predictors facilitate the political socialization process. Specifically, politicization improves child perception, but has no role in the child's motivation to adopt parental values. Closeness and parental value strength influence children to want to be like their parents, but do nothing to improve children's ability to recognize their parents' values. And education, previously thought to have little role in transmission, does not influence a child's ability to understand their parent's affiliation, but appears to make children more likely to reject whatever they believe it to be.

Autocrats use repression to deter opposition. Are they successful in the long run? The author argues that state repression can have long-lasting alienating effects on citizens’ political attitudes and coercive effects on their political behavior. The article evaluates this proposition by studying the long-term effects of state terror during China's Cultural Revolution. It shows that individuals who grew up in localities that were exposed to more state-sponsored violence in the late 1960s are less trusting of national political leaders and more critical of the country's political system today. These anti-regime attitudes are more likely to be passed down to the younger generation if family members discuss politics frequently than if they do not. Yet while state repression has created anti-regime attitudes, it has decreased citizens’ contentious behavior. These findings highlight the dilemma that authoritarian rulers face when they seek to consolidate their rule through repression.

It is both academically and practically valuable to construct a multi-dimensional scale to assess the effectiveness of the Communist Party of China's (CPC) policy toward Taiwan. The author constructed a One China identity scale based on national identity theory and the CPC's political advocacy and actions toward Taiwan. Using panel data from 271 members of Taiwanese student delegations to Mainland China from 2016 to 2017, this study explored the changes in their sense of a One China identity. The results showed a significant increase (0.11, 5.19%) in the average ratings of the investigated students' One China identity. The regression equation constructed by the current study was able to explain 10.94% of the total variance of the One China identity scale, and all three hypotheses were supported. Following the exchange program, Taiwanese students appeared to have a greater sense of a One China identity. Their impression of Mainland China had improved, their acceptance of the CPC's regime had increased, and their preference for authoritarianism had increased.

While early gendered messages mold children's expectations about the world, we know relatively little about the depictions of women in politics and exposure to gender stereotypes in elementary social studies curricula. In this article, we examine the coverage of political leaders in the children's magazine TIME for Kids, a source commonly found in elementary school classrooms. Coding all political content from this source over six years, we evaluate the presence of women political leaders and rate whether the leaders are described as possessing gender-stereotypic traits. Our results show that although TIME for Kids covers women leaders in greater proportion than their overall representation in politics, the content of the coverage contains gendered messages that portray politics as a stereotypically masculine field. We show that gendered traits are applied differently to men and to women in politics: feminine and communal traits are more likely to be applied to women leaders, while men and women are equally described as having masculine and agentic traits. Portrayals of women political leaders in stereotype-congruent ways is problematic because early messages influence children's views of gender roles.

While popular narratives regarding the destiny of demographics assume Latino interstate migrants will alter destination state politics as Latinos disperse across the states, no studies directly assess the empirical validity of the underlying assumption of migrant's political preferences. Moreover, established theories of domestic migrant preferences suggest a variety of potential individual-level behaviors that often diverge from the underlying assumption of a uniform introduction of more liberal voters. Employing data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, this study presents an analysis on Latino interstate migrant voting behavior, while also overcoming a variety of data limitations in existing studies. Countering some previous findings that homophily, adaptation, or even a static liberal orientation describes migrant voting behavior, the results suggest that Latino interstate migrant preferences vary by the political context of their previous state of residence. The results imply that the destiny of demographics will be conditioned, to some extent, by the migratory patterns of Latinos and the dyad of departure and destination states. When Latinos leave liberal (conservative) states, they bring more liberal (conservative) policies. In short, Latinos seem to pack their politics when moving across state lines.

This article explores the origins of youth engagement in school, community and democracy. Specifically, it considers the role of psychosocial or non-cognitive abilities, like grit or perseverance. Using a novel original large-scale longitudinal survey of students linked to school administrative records and a variety of modeling techniques – including sibling, twin and individual fixed effects – the study finds that psychosocial abilities are a strong predictor of youth civic engagement. Gritty students miss less class time and are more engaged in their schools, are more politically efficacious, are more likely to intend to vote when they become eligible, and volunteer more. Our work highlights the value of psychosocial attributes in the political socialization of young people.

Physical attractiveness is an important social factor in our daily interactions. Scholars in social psychology provide evidence that attractiveness stereotypes and the “halo effect” are prominent in affecting the traits we attribute to others. However, the interest in attractiveness has not directly filtered down to questions of political behavior beyond candidates and elites. Utilizing measures of attractiveness across multiple surveys, we examine the relationship between attractiveness and political beliefs. Controlling for socioeconomic status, we find that more attractive individuals are more likely to report higher levels of political efficacy, identify as conservative, and identify as Republican. These findings suggest an additional mechanism for political socialization that has further implications for understanding how the body intertwines with the social nature of politics.

To what extent are new generations ‘Thatcherite’? Using British Social Attitudes data for 1985–2012 and applying age-period-cohort analysis and generalized additive models, this article investigates whether Thatcher’s Children hold more right-authoritarian political values compared to other political generations. The study further examines the extent to which the generation that came of age under New Labour – Blair’s Babies – shares these values. The findings for generation effects indicate that the later political generation is even more right-authoritarian, including with respect to attitudes to redistribution, welfare and crime. This view is supported by evidence of cohort effects. These results show that the legacy of Thatcherism for left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values is its long-term shaping of public opinion through political socialization.

Extant research on immigrant incorporation pays little attention to variations among immigrants from the same ethnic origin. A main purpose of this study is to address this research void by exploring how differences in the pre-emigration socialization context for immigrants from a politically divided homeland may affect their participation in mainstream-oriented and homeland-regarded politics. I posit that experiences Asian immigrants have in different political systems before crossing the Pacific may result in different relationships they maintain with their homeland as well as different attitudes toward homeland government and policies they develop after the crossing; and this, in turn, may affect how much they participate in politics on both sides of the Pacific. However, through the process of resocialization, I also suggest immigrants' political behavior may be influenced by their degree of exposure to the host society as well as by their connectedness with its institutions. Using data from the 2007 Chinese American Homeland Politics survey, I focus on the experiences of US immigrants of Chinese descent from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to test these hypotheses.