Political socialization is the process whereby individuals are initiated into the dominant values and traditions of a society, including those values which define the legitimate processes of politics and the way that power is exercised.
Political socialization occurs throughout an individual’s life, but it peaks during childhood and adolescence.
The family is generally the primary agent of political socialization. Schools, the media, and peer groups follow close behind.
As a phenomenon, political socialization has been around for centuries, but it has been studied extensively and systematically since the early 20th century.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, educators in the United States conducted studies of school children that included choices of national figures most admired by the children (Greenstein, 1965).
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Political socialization is the lifelong process by which people acquire the political attitudes, party loyalties, and civic outlook that shape how, and whether, they vote.
- Main Agents: Family, schools, the media, peers, religion, and, in adulthood, political parties and the workplace all shape political attitudes; family is usually the earliest and most durable influence.
- Adult Change: Classic theory treated childhood views as fixed for life; research now shows adult events and life transitions, such as marriage, work, and retirement, keep reshaping political attitudes.
- Impressionable Years: People are most open to political change from their mid-teens through their mid-twenties, after which their views become considerably more stable.
- Examples: A parent taking a child to vote, a school’s mock election, and a friend’s differing opinion are everyday examples of political socialization.
- Modern Research: Research since 2015 shows that hostility toward the opposing political side, not just party loyalty, is now being passed down within families.
Early research also focused on understanding how World War II and the Cold War influenced children’s attitudes toward politics and government (Greenstein, 1965).
Hyman (1959) coined the modern term in his book Political Socialization, treating political learning as a distinct field of study rather than a footnote to adult public-opinion research.
By the 1970s and 1980s, panel studies followed the same people across decades, most famously the Jennings–Niemi socialization panel discussed below.
In more recent years, the lens has widened. Race, gender, and social class now sit alongside age, education, and family background, and researchers increasingly ask how digital media reshapes the classic agents of socialization discussed throughout this article.
Hyman (1959) conceptualized political socialization along three dimensions: participation or involvement in politics, radical or conservative goals, and democratic or authoritarian forms.
These three dimensions are interrelated but independent. An individual can rate high or low on any one dimension without being high or low on the others.
Agents of political Socialization
Family
The family is considered the primary agent of political socialization. From an early age, children absorb their parents’ political views long before they can evaluate those views critically.
This effect is strongest for party identification specifically. Children are far more likely to correctly name their parents’ party than to share any other single political attitude their parents hold.
This is the field’s most-cited demonstration of that transmission.
Aim: M. Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi set out to test how much political values actually transfer from parent to child. They wanted to know along which dimensions transmission is strongest (Jennings & Niemi, 1968).
Method: The researchers ran a national survey. High school seniors and one of their parents each answered questions on party identification, political interest, and specific policy attitudes.
Results: Transmission was strongest for party identification. It was markedly weaker for specific policy attitudes and general liberal-conservative orientation (Jennings & Niemi, 1968).
Conclusion: Families transmit identity, not ideology. Children learn which side they are on long before they absorb any consistent set of beliefs.
Parents also model how to participate: taking a child to a city council meeting, or helping them register to vote at eighteen (Jennings & Niemi, 2015).
Some go further. They bring children to political protests and rallies that reflect the family’s own views.
While the family is the main agent of political socialization, there is little overt indoctrination. Children absorb political traditions through everyday conversation and observed behaviour, not deliberate teaching.
Family influence is probabilistic, not guaranteed. Many parents and children hold radically different views on politics.
A child raised in a religious, conservative household may rebel by becoming a liberal atheist, for example (Jennings & Niemi, 2015).
Friends
Friends matter for political socialization too. Family, school, and the media supply information about politics, but friends are often the first people we turn to for political discussion.
A friend can introduce new perspectives and act as a sounding board for one’s own beliefs (Reidy et al., 2015). Disagreement does this too: it is often through talking with someone who sees things differently that a person’s own views become clearer.
Politically active friends are contagious. People are more likely to get involved themselves when their friends are already engaged, and friends offer motivation and support for taking action on issues they care about.
Not every friend shares the same politics.
Even so, friends who disagree still matter. Seeing both sides of an issue through a friendship, rather than despite it, builds a more nuanced understanding of complex political questions (Reidy et al., 2015).
Education
Schools are the primary site of formal political socialization, through explicit civics and government classes.
Civic education is one part of this. It means curriculum-based instruction in government and citizenship.
From a young age, children learn about government in social studies classes and debate current events in the classroom.
As children get older, some take part in student government or activities like Model United Nations. Schools help shape political views and prepare students to be active citizens.
Effective civic education engages students directly.
Mock elections and legislative hearings do this better than textbooks alone (Jennings & Niemi, 2015).
Does civic education actually cause civic engagement? Or do already civic-minded students simply choose civic-minded schools? One study tested this directly.
Aim: David Campbell tested the “sorting model.”
This is the idea that schools do not create civic engagement so much as sort already-inclined students into reinforcing environments (Campbell, 2009).
Method: Campbell tracked students over time. He compared civic attitudes and school environments. This let him test whether school climate predicted later engagement, independent of prior disposition.
Results: School civic climate helped. It had its own, positive effect on later civic participation, beyond what prior disposition or family sorting could explain. The effect was moderate, though real (Campbell, 2009).
Conclusion: Schools are not just a passive marker of pre-existing civic inclination. They make an independent contribution to civic engagement.
The college years can push political attitudes further still.
The clearest demonstration comes from one of social psychology’s most revisited natural experiments.
Aim: Theodore Newcomb studied Bennington College. He tracked political attitudes among young women there. The college was small, progressive, and Vermont-based, with a markedly liberal faculty (Newcomb, 1943).
Method: Newcomb surveyed Bennington students, most from wealthy, politically conservative families, at multiple points across their college years. He compared different class years and tracked change over time.
Results: Roughly a third of students shifted. They moved markedly away from their families’ conservative politics toward Bennington’s progressive views, especially those most socially engaged on campus (Newcomb, 1943).
Conclusion: A concentrated, socially engaging college environment can override prior family political socialization. A fifty-year follow-up of the same women found the shift had lasted a lifetime (Alwin, Cohen, & Newcomb, 1991).
Schools are not always effective agents of political socialization, however. Many devote little time to civics next to core subjects like math and reading.
Teachers often avoid controversial topics, for fear of offending parents or sparking classroom conflict. Many students leave school with only a limited grasp of how government works.
Mass media
Children also learn about politics from the media. Television, movies, and music often carry messages about political issues and events.
A child might see a news story about a hurricane and learn about the government’s role in emergency relief. A movie about a corrupt politician can teach the same child why honesty in government matters.
Mass media’s ability to shape political attitudes has grown. There are simply more media outlets, and new technology makes media experiences more engaging than before.
Most people have no personal access to government or politicians. Their political experience is therefore mostly vicarious, absorbed through the news. The average American spends roughly forty hours a week with mass media of some kind (Rideout, 2007), so exposure to political messages is frequent (Adoni, 1979).
Media habits have also shifted. People spend less time with newspapers and television news, and more with the internet and social networking sites.
One result is that people increasingly encounter political content through their own personal networks rather than broader, impersonal sources.
Some researchers argue this fuels political radicalization. Personalized networks foster echo chambers, in which people mostly meet information and opinions that already match their own (Adoni, 1979).
Religion
Religion is a distinct agent of political socialization. Religious beliefs and institutions shape political views both through doctrine and through the social and organizational resources they provide.
Religious leaders can help shape public opinion on political issues, and religious institutions can offer meeting spaces, social networks, and mobilization capacity that political campaigns draw on directly.
How strong is this link in practice? One review pulled together the evidence.
Aim: Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz and James Gimpel reviewed the accumulated evidence on how religious affiliation, belief, and participation shape American political attitudes and behaviour (Pearson-Merkowitz & Gimpel, 2010).
Method: The review synthesizes survey and observational evidence linking religious tradition, religiosity, and institutional participation to voting behaviour and civic participation across the American electorate.
Results: Religious affiliation reliably predicts voting behaviour. Evangelical Protestants lean Republican, mainline Protestants and Catholics lean more Democratic, and the religiously unaffiliated are more likely to vote third-party or abstain (Pearson-Merkowitz & Gimpel, 2010).
Conclusion: Religion works as a political-socialization agent through both belief content and institutional structure, strongly enough to function as a reliable individual-level predictor.
Political parties
Political parties and political socialization are closely linked concepts in political science. Party identification was originally conceptualized as an identity, one that could form without the cognitive sophistication needed to fully understand the political world.
Later scholarship characterized partisanship differently: less a fixed identity, more an ongoing disposition shaped by how governments and other political actors, notably the economy, actually perform (Stoker & Bass, 2011). Either way, it tends to endure once formed.
Parties are secondary agents of socialization with an explicitly political character. They exist to spread political ideas, mobilize engagement, and cultivate political leaders.
Being part of a party community matters too.
Attending meetings and campaigning alongside co-partisans helps people connect with others who share their views. This builds a better understanding of the political process and clearer choices about who to vote for. Sustained involvement further solidifies the party’s own beliefs in its members (Stoker & Bass, 2011).
Work
The average American spends over eight hours a day at work. That makes the workplace an important site for political socialization.
Coworkers often become close friends. The workplace offers a built-in support system too.
Workplaces also provide structure and routine, which can help during difficult times. This matters more than people think. As people become more enmeshed in their work community, they grow more likely to identify with the beliefs of those around them.
Work functions much like a peer group in this way (Wasburn & Covert, 2017).
Employers know this.
Some use work explicitly as a vehicle for political socialization: mandatory attendance at politically charged seminars, or messaging promoting the company’s own political views.
More often, though, the pressure is subtler. It’s a nudge to support the company’s favored candidates or policies. Employees who resist can find themselves passed over for promotion, or even lose their job.
People tend to self-censor their political views at work as a result. This can shape their overall outlook (Wasburn & Covert, 2017).
Characteristics and Importance
Political understanding develops in predictable stages. It also keeps evolving well into adulthood. Two threads run through this: how children’s grasp of government matures with age, and how political attitudes stay genuinely open to change across the whole life course.
How Children’s Understanding of Government Develops
Children realize they belong to a town, and eventually to a nation. A political self begins to form as children start to see politics as its own distinct realm in the preschool years (Easton & Dennis, 1969).
Younger children tend to think of government personally. The first political figures American children recognize are usually the president and the police officer.
Children tend to idealize these figures. That idealization has weakened in recent years as scandals have become more visible through the media (Easton & Dennis, 1969).
School ceremonies, such as singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” each morning, can inspire patriotism in young children, who generally hold positive attitudes toward the political system.
Older children think about government more abstractly. By ages 8-10, most have a basic grasp of government as an institution separate from any individual (Easton & Dennis, 1969).
Political Socialization Across the Life Course
Sociologists believe people are most politically impressionable from their mid-teens through their mid-twenties, when views are not yet set.
One study tested this pattern directly.
Aim: Duane Alwin and Jon Krosnick tested whether political-attitude stability follows this age pattern. They also asked whether it reflects individual aging or a birth cohort’s shared history (Alwin & Krosnick, 1991).
Method: The researchers tracked cohorts for decades. They used repeated national survey data to measure the same and comparable age groups’ attitude stability over long intervals.
Results: Attitude stability rose sharply from adolescence through the mid-twenties, then largely plateaued through middle adulthood. This matched the impressionable-years pattern, though the effect’s size varied by which attitude was measured (Alwin & Krosnick, 1991).
Conclusion: Political attitudes go through a period of youthful plasticity. Durable, though never absolute, crystallization follows.
Significant life events can still shift views after this window closes.
Work, marriage, parenthood, and retirement can all significantly alter someone’s political outlook (Steckenrider & Cutler, 1989).
Political socialization does not automatically produce political participation. It does help explain why some people participate and others do not.
Classical theory held that people with more contact with agents of political socialization, such as parents, teachers, and friends, were typically more politically active (Greenstein, 1965).
More recent scholarship disagrees on the cause.
Education level and socio-economic status, the argument goes, predict political participation better than exposure to socialization agents does (Griffin & Newman, 2005).
Researchers in this field split their attention two ways. Some focus on what political socialization means for political institutions. Others focus on what it means for individuals navigating their own political environment.
The field’s topics range from broad questions of national identity and shared political norms to narrower ones like partisanship and issue preferences.
This helps explain both how political culture endures and how individual attitudes form (Jennings & Niemi, 2015).
Rival Theories of Political Socialization
Political socialization theory is not one single account. Three traditions disagree about what socialization is actually doing.
Functionalist
The functionalist tradition treats political socialization as a way of keeping a political system stable and legitimate across generations.
Each new cohort learns a broadly positive view of government. This reproduces the public support political systems need to function, whatever any government’s actual performance (Easton & Dennis, 1969).
Comparative research fits this tradition too.
A classic study examined political attitudes and democratic stability across five nations, including the United States and the United Kingdom (Almond & Verba, 1963).
It treated a well-socialized “civic culture” as the social-psychological precondition for stable democracy. This culture combines political awareness with an underlying deference to authority.
Almond and Verba surveyed thousands of citizens across five countries. They asked how competent, trusting, and participatory each population felt toward its own government.
The nations closest to the American and British pattern reported the healthiest mix of engagement and deference, which the authors linked to democratic stability.
Conflict and Critical Perspectives
Where functionalists see stability, conflict-oriented and critical scholars see something else: the reproduction of existing power and class relations, dressed up as neutral civic learning.
Critical family-policy scholarship makes a similar case about parenting itself.
Family policy in Britain, the United States, and other post-industrial states increasingly frames a child’s future political and economic standing as a matter of individual parental effort. This locates real structural inequalities inside private family choices instead (Gillies, 2008).
The description sounds neutral. It is not.
It points attention toward individual family behaviour and away from the structural, economic roots of political disengagement. A related, class-focused account of family transmission is Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital.
A functionalist would read the same civic curriculum as legitimate system-maintenance. A conflict theorist reads it as ideology in disguise.
Symbolic Interactionist and Agentic Perspectives
A third reading rejects both of those.
Political attitudes, on this view, are actively negotiated in everyday interaction, not simply transmitted top-down.
The peer-group pattern discussed above fits this picture well. Friends shape one another’s views as much through disagreement as agreement.
So does research on young people building political identity in a post-conflict, ethnically divided community, under conditions their parents’ generation never knew (Reidy et al., 2015).
The Bennington shift is a further example (Newcomb, 1943). Students there moved away from their family’s political tradition entirely.
No purely functionalist or purely conflict-based account would predict that shift on its own.
These traditions genuinely disagree, rather than simply describing different slices of the same thing.
A functionalist reads civic education as legitimate system-maintenance. A conflict theorist reads the same curriculum as ideology in disguise. An interactionist stresses that students, teachers, and peer culture keep renegotiating what a lesson actually comes to mean.
Critical Evaluation of Political Socialization
The empirical core of political-socialization research is well replicated across six decades of work.
Families transmit partisan identity more reliably than specific policy positions, and attitudes are comparatively malleable in adolescence.
Its scope and framing still attract real criticism.
The Causality Problem in Family Transmission
Much of the classic evidence is correlational. That includes the Jennings and Niemi (1968) study described above.
Parent and child share more than direct modelling. They also share a neighbourhood, a socioeconomic status, and a media diet.
So a strong parent-child correlation on party identification does not, by itself, rule out shared environmental confounds unrelated to any actual teaching.
Behavioural-genetic research has sharpened this problem rather than resolved it.
Twin studies comparing identical and fraternal twins raised together found a substantial heritable component to broad political orientation, though not necessarily to specific party choice (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005).
This does not overturn the family-socialization literature.
It does mean parent-child political similarity can no longer be treated as automatic proof of social transmission alone.
Generalizability Beyond the American Two-Party System
The classic literature has a narrow base. It was built almost entirely on mid-twentieth-century American samples in stable, two-party democracies.
The names are familiar. Hyman, Easton and Dennis, Jennings and Niemi, and Almond and Verba are all part of this pattern.
A large panel study tracked Dutch adolescents and their parents from ages twelve to twenty-five (Rekker, Keijsers, Branje, & Meeus, 2018).
In this multiparty system, broad left-right identification dominated how political preference first formed and stayed stable, not attachment to any single party.
A core construct built for two parties needs real modification. Replication alone will not do, once the institutional context changes.
The finding matters beyond the Netherlands. Most democracies outside the United States run on three or more viable parties, so a theory that only works for two-party attachment has limited reach.
Whether the same age-eighteen crystallization point recurs outside the Netherlands remains an open question.
Contemporary Research
Research since 2015 has revisited the very territory Easton and Dennis first mapped. This time the question is whether family disagreement, not just agreement, shapes children’s political identity.
Aim: Matthew Tyler and Shanto Iyengar asked a direct question. Is the affective polarization seen among adult partisans since around 2000 also present among adolescents, and does it trace back to parental influence (Tyler & Iyengar, 2022)?
Method: The researchers compared today’s adolescents against a 1980 benchmark study. There was also a follow-up question. Did adolescents who shared their parents’ partisan identity, and whose parents held more polarized views, show more polarization themselves?
Results: Today’s adolescents are about as affectively polarized as adults, a sharp change from the 1980 benchmark. Parental influence specifically predicted this polarization (Tyler & Iyengar, 2022).
Conclusion: Affective polarization is not mainly an adult phenomenon. It is substantially transmitted through the same family channel Jennings and Niemi identified over fifty years earlier (Tyler & Iyengar, 2022).
A related study looked at disagreement itself. It examined families where parents and children genuinely disagree politically.
More disagreement and more polarization there link to less willingness to accommodate a family member’s differing views, which damages the family’s shared sense of identity (Warner, Colaner, & Park, 2020).
Together, the two studies point the same way: family transmission works not only when parent and child agree, but also, more corrosively, when they disagree under high national polarization.
Structural factors matter too.
Education level and socio-economic status, one line of research argues, predict political participation better than exposure to socialization agents alone (Griffin & Newman, 2005).
That cautions against treating “well-socialized” and “will participate” as the same thing.
References
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