Political participation has long been viewed as a social act. But the influence of social relationships on participation is often impossible to disentangle from the factors that select people into these relationships. To overcome this challenge, we study randomly assigned college roommates, thus reducing these selection biases and other confounds. We examine short-run social influence of roommates on voter participation in 2016 and longer-term effects in the 2018 and 2020 elections. We collected consent from over 2,000 first-year students, allowing us to obtain a matched voter file indicating which students voted and the public voting histories of students’ parents, an indicator of students’ pre-college political environment socialization. Our evidence suggests that roommates’ influence on turnout decisions rivals the association between students’ turnout and that of their parents. Yet this parity masks gender differences. For women, the effect of roommates is larger. For men, the student-parent association exceeds the roommate effect.

This article examines the challenges of subject formation within state-building efforts by analyzing Keyhān-e Bachcheh-hā (Children’s Universe), a widely circulated Iranian children’s magazine during the post-revolutionary period. Through analyzing the magazine’s content from 1979 to 1989, when the Islamic Republic was consolidating its power and building institutions, this study reveals how the publication served as a key informal education platform, attempting to create politically conscious yet ideologically compliant young citizens. While the magazine aimed to cultivate revolutionary consciousness through anti-imperialist rhetoric and Islamic values, it simultaneously imposed rigid behavioral and ideological boundaries to produce what I term “docile revolutionary children.” The research demonstrates how political themes permeated every aspect of the magazine—from stories and poems to puzzles and contests—transforming it from an entertainment platform into a vehicle for political socialization. Through examination of revolutionary and wartime discourses, gender representation, and the promotion of social humility, this study argues that Keyhān-e Bachcheh-hā embodied a fundamental tension in the state’s vision of ideal citizenship: the simultaneous demand for revolutionary agency and absolute submission to clerical authority. This research contributes to our understanding of how post-revolutionary states employ cultural institutions to shape young citizens and the inherent contradictions in such efforts at political socialization.

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.