M. Kent Jennings

Generations and Politics: A Panel Study of Young Adults and Their Parents

Kent Jennings and Richard Nieini arc recognized widely for their 1965 study of the development of political attitudes and behavior among a large, nationally representative sample of high school seniors and their parents (The Political Character of Adolescence, Princeton). Now they present the results of a follow-up study of these same individuals in 1973 along with a fresh study of 1973 high school seniors. Spanning a dramatic eight-year historical period and an important transitional phase in the life cycle of the younger generation, this material provides a unique opportunity to assess the development of political attitudes and participation.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Transmission of Political Values from Parent to Child

In understanding the political development of the pre-adult one of the central questions hinges on the relative and differentiated contributions of various socializing agents. The question undoubtedly proves more difficult as one traverses a range of polities from those where life and learning are almost completely wrapped up in the immediate and extended family to those which are highly complex social organisms and in which the socialization agents are extremely varied. To gain some purchase on the role of one socializing agent in our own complex society, this paper will take up the specific question of the transmission of certain values from parent to child as observed in late adolescence. After noting parent-child relationships for a variety of political values, attention will be turned to some aspects of family structure which conceivably affect the transmission flows. I. Assessing the Familys Impact: “Foremost among agencies of socialization into politics is the family.” So begins Herbert Hymans discussion of the sources of political learning. 1 Hyman explicitly recognized the importance of other agents, but he was neither the first nor the last observer to stress the preeminent position of the family. This viewpoint relies heavily on both the direct and indirect role of the family in shaping the basic orientations of offspring. Whether the child is conscious or unaware of the impact, whether the process is role-modelling or overt transmission, whether the values are political and directly usable or “nonpolitical” but transferable, and whether what is passed on lies in the cognitive or affective realm, it has been argued that the family is of paramount importance.

Internet Use and Civic Engagement: A Longitudinal Analysis

Conclusions about the impact of the Internet on civic engagement have been hampered by the unavailability of before and after measures, a shortage of varied and multiple indicators of attitudes and behaviors regarding engagement, and insufficient attention to generational differences. This article seeks to address these weaknesses by employing a quasi-experimental design that draws on the 1982 and 1997 waves of a panel study that began with a national sample of the high school class of 1965 and that also includes that generations lineage successor. Comparisons between those using and not using the Internet demonstrated that the digital divide, the original pre-Internet gap in civic engagement, remained in place or increased slightly over time. Taking into account pre-Internet levels of civic engagement and key socio-economic characteristics indicates that Internet access has positive effects on several indicators of civic engagement. Comparisons of civic engagement among Internet users according to how much they employ the Internet for political purposes revealed modest bivariate associations and very little independent effect at the multivariate level. The connection between the Internet and civic engagement differed across the two generations in some respects, explained in part by intergenerational divergence in the intersection between the stage of individual political development and incorporation of the Internet into a persons media repertory

Political Socialization and the High School Civics Curriculum in the United States

Attempts to map the political development of individuals inevitably become involved with the relative contribution of different socialization agencies throughout the life cycle. Research has focused to a large extent on the family and to a much lesser degree on other agents such as the educational system. At the secondary school level very little has been done to examine systematically the selected aspects of the total school environment. To gain some insight into the role of the formal school environment, this paper will explore the relationship between the civics curriculum and political attitudes and behavior in American high schools. A number of studies, recently fortified by data from Gabriel Almond and Sidneys Verbas five-nation study, stress the crucial role played by formal education in the political socialization process. [None of the other variables] compares with the educational variable in the extent to which it seems to determine political attitudes. The uneducated man or the man with limited education is a different political actor from the man who has achieved a high level of education. 1 Such conclusions would not have greatly surprised the founders of the American republic, for they stressed the importance of education to the success of democratic and republican government. Starting from its early days the educational system incorporated civic training. Textbooks exposing threats to the new republic were being used in American schools by the 1790s. By 1915, the term “civics” became associated with high school courses which emphasized the study of political institutions and citizenship training. 2

Issues and Inheritance in the Formation of Party Identification

Movement of party identification, both within and across generations, is increasingly seen as responsive to current policy preferences. We explore cross-generational change using three-wave parent-offspring data. The results strongly support the revised view of a more malleable partisanship influenced by offspring issue preferences. Nonetheless, parents play a major role in determining the initial political direction of their offspring and continue to play a significant though reduced role in the over-time development of their adult children. The results are similar for presidential preferences, though parental influence is entirely channeled through offspring partisanship.

Pathways to Participation

The premise of this article is that adult participation in politics is affected by strong preadult forces in addition to the contemporaneous factors emphasized by recent studies. To test this premise, data are drawn from the 1965–1973 national socialization panel study of young Americans and their parents. Four causal models depicting pathways to participation among young adults are evaluated; each includes civic orientations as intervening variables. Three of the models assess the direct and indirect effects of parental characteristics—socioeconomic status, political activity, and civic orientations. The fourth model assesses the impact of adolescent involvement in high school activities. Taken individually, each pathway is shown to have an effect on adult participation, with parent socioeconomic status and high school activism having the most impact. When the four pathways are combined in a single model to reflect the connections among them, all remain important. The combined model illustrates the importance of a variety of methods of political learning. The combined model also demonstrates the crucial role of civic orientations in converting preadult experiences into later participation. Civic orientations are the primary carriers of preadult political learning. Overall, the results rebut the critics of socialization research who have questioned the existence of a linkage between early learning and adult political behavior.

Partisan Orientations over the Long Haul: Results from the Three-Wave Political Socialization Panel Study

The present study examines the dynamics of partisanship and voting behavior by utilizing national survey panel data gathered in 1965, 1973, and 1982 from two strategically situated generations—members of the high school senior class of 1965 and their parents. At the aggregate level, generational effects appeared in the persistently weaker partisan attachments of the younger generation. At the individual level, strong effects based on experience and habituation appeared in the remarkable gains occurring in the stability of partisan and other orientations among the young as they aged from their mid-20s to their mid-30s. Dynamic modeling of the relationship between partisanship and voting choice demonstrated that the younger voters had stabilized at an overall weaker level of partisanship, leading to more volatile voting behavior which, in turn, failed to provide the consistent reinforcement needed to intensify preexisting partisan leanings.

Continuities in political action : a longitudinal study of political orientations in three western democracies

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Family Traditions, Political Periods, and the Development of Partisan Orientations

Two of the most important influences on adult political orientations are the political proclivities of their family of origin and the pressures of the times in which they first enter the electorate. Drawing upon a three-wave panel study of young Americans over the 1965-1982 time period and conceiving of parental orientations as producing a broad familial environment, this article traces the influence of parents on the partisanship and politicization of their children as the youth mature from adolescence to middle adulthood during a particularly turbulent period of American politics. The parental partisan legacy remained strong even though it was eroded by the antipartisan period pressures of the late 1960s and early 1970s. By contrast, family levels of politicization were reproduced only modestly throughout, leaving ample room for attentiveness to politics to develop outside of the family tradition. However, the interaction between the partisanship and the politicization of the family environment governs the dealignment of the youth generation after 1965. Youth from politicized Republican and Democratic families were affected most by the powerful antipartisan pressures of the post-1965 period.

Generation units and the student protest movement in the United States: an intra- and intergenerational analysis

The American student protest movement provides exceptional opportunities to observe how formative political experiences can affect intragenerational cleavages over the adult life span and how they may reflect on intergenerational continuities. Long-term national panel data from the high school class of 1965 and data from their parents and offspring are used here to exploit these opportunities. The results show that a sharp rift in political participation and attitudes emerged between protesters and non-protesters during the protest era, a rift that persists into mid-life and one that testifies to the conceptual utility of generation units. Continuities across the three lineage generations are demonstrated by the moderate similarities in the ideological and participative orientations that are associated with the protest status of the student generation.