Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research at DIW BerlinThis series presents research findings based either directly on data from the German SocioEconomic Panel Study (SOEP) or using SOEP data as part of an internationally comparable data set (e.g. CNEF, ECHP, LIS, LWS, CHER/PACO). SOEP is a truly multidisciplinary household panel study covering a wide range of social and behavioral sciences: economics, sociology, psychology, survey methodology, econometrics and applied statistics, educational science, political science, public health, behavioral genetics, demography, geography, and sport science.The decision to publish a submission in SOEPpapers is made by a board of editors chosen by the DIW Berlin to represent the wide range of disciplines covered by SOEP. There is no external referee process and papers are either accepted or rejected without revision. Papers appear in this series as works in progress and may also appear elsewhere. They often represent preliminary studies and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be requested from the author directly.Any opinions expressed in this series are those of the author(s) and not those of DIW Berlin.Research disseminated by DIW Berlin may include views on public policy issues, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. Milbrath, 1965: 40; Verba, Schlozman and Brady, 1995: 334). While the existence of a relationship between political interest and political engagement is uncontested, much less is known about the origins of interest in politics and its development over the life span.Recent debates regarding a growing distance between citizens and the traditional institutions of representative democracy have resulted in a revival of political socialization studies directed to update our understanding of the origins and development of political orientations. The context in which citizens grow up is assumed to be central for the development of political involvement.Traditionally, family and the school environment are considered primary socializing agents influencing the formation of political engagement already throughout childhood. Socialization experiences during the impressionable years are thought to matter disproportionally, after which their impact reduces as political attitudes stabilize during early adulthood.Indeed, in a recent publication,...

The development of political engagement in early life is significant given its impact on political knowledge and participation. Analyses reveal a large influence of parents on their offspring's curiosity about politics during their teenage years. Increasingly, civic education is also considered an important influence on political interest and orientations of young people as schools are assigned a crucial role in creating and maintaining civic equality. We study the effects of civic education on political engagement, focusing especially on whether and how civic education can compensate for missing parental political socialization. We use data from the Belgian Political Panel Study (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011) and the U.S. Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study , which both contain information on political attitudes and behaviors of adolescents and young adults, those of their parents, and on the educational curriculum of the young respondents. Our findings suggest that civics training in schools indeed compensates for inequalities in family socialization with respect to political engagement. This conclusion holds for two very different countries (the U.S. and Belgium), at very different points in time (the 1960s and the 2000s), and for a varying length of observation (youth to old age and impressionable years only).

Political socialization describes the process by which citizens crystalize political identities, values and behavior that remain relatively persistent throughout later life. This chapter provides a comprehensive discussion of the scholarly debate on political socialization, posing a number of questions that arise in the study of political socialization and the making of citizens. First, what is it about early life experiences that makes them matter for political attitudes, political engagement, and political behavior? Second, what age is crucial in the development of citizens’ political outlook? Third, who and what influences political orientations and behavior in early life, and how are cohorts colored by the nature of time when they come of age? Fourth, how do political preferences and behavior develop after the impressionable years? The chapter further provides an outlook of the challenges and opportunities for the field of political socialization.

This paper examines how the system change following the collapse of socialism affected the political outlook of citizens by comparing the satisfaction with democracy among several generations of Eastern Europeans. I investigate whether people who were mainly influenced by a socialist upbringing have problems with adjusting to the circumstances of democratic regimes or, alternatively, whether the consolidation of democracy is driven by economic considerations. Using pooled cross-sectional data covering the period from 1990 to 2003, this study employs generalized additive models, which allow the separation of generational differences. The paper obtains strong support for the socialist socialization hypothesis, but also finds evidence that Eastern Europeans' assessment of the economic situation reduces the impact of generational differences on democratic support. This research provides important insights into the micro mechanisms underlying system change from authoritarian regimes to democracy.

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While previous research on the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue attitudes and their party support emphasize citizens’ issue positions, political competition revolves equally around issue salience – that is, debates over which issue areas political parties should prioritize. Using multi-wave panel survey data from Germany and Great Britain, this study analyzes the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue salience and their party support, and concludes that citizens’ issue priorities both influence and are influenced by their party attachments and, moreover, that these effects are linked to parties’ long-term associative issue ownership. This effect is strongest among supporters of a small issue-orientated niche party, the German Greens.

Empirical election studies conclude that party elites' images with respect to competence, integrity and party unity -attributes that we label character-based valence -affect their electoral support (Stone and Simas, 2010). We compile observations of media reports Downloaded from pertaining to governing party elites' character-based valence attributes, and we relate the content of these reports to mass support for the governing parties. We present pooled, time-series, analyses of party support and valence-related media reports in six European polities which suggest that these reports exert powerful electoral effects during election campaigns but little effect during off-election periods. This finding, which we label the Election Period Valence Effect, is consistent with previous work concluding that citizens are also more attentive to policy-based considerations and to national economic conditions around the time of elections. These findings have implications for political representation and for understanding election outcomes.

Party identification has been thought to provide the central organizing element for political belief systems. This article makes the contrasting case that core values concerning equality and government intervention versus individualism and free enterprise are fundamental orientations that can themselves shape partisanship. The authors evaluate these arguments in the British case using a validated multiple-item measure of core values, using ordered latent class models to estimate reciprocal effects with partisanship on panel data from the British Household Panel Study, 1991–2007. The findings demonstrate that core values are more stable than partisanship and have far stronger cross-lagged effects on partisanship than vice versa in both polarized and depolarized political contexts, for younger and older respondents, and for those with differing levels of educational attainment and income, thus demonstrating their general utility as decision-making heuristics.