Political Socialization in Flux?: Linking Family Non-Intactness During Childhood to Adult Civic Engagement

Abstract

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. www.econstor.eu Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S ABSTRACT Political Socialization in Flux? Linking Family Non-Intactness during Childhood to Adult Civic EngagementSome sociologists argue that non-intact family structures during childhood have a negative effect on adult children's civic engagement, since they undermine, and in some cases prevent, the processes and activities through which parents shape their children's political attitudes and orientations. In this paper, we evaluate this hypothesis on the basis of longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In a first step, we construct various measures of family structure during childhood, and perform both cross-sectional and sibling difference analyses for different indicators of young adults' civic engagement. Both exercises reveal a significant negative relationship between growing up in a non-intact family and children's political engagement as adults. In a second step, we implement a novel technique -proposed by Oster (2014) -for evaluating robustness of results to omitted variable bias. The distinctive feature of this technique is that it accounts for both coefficient movements and movements in R-squared values after the inclusion of controls. Results suggest that our estimates do not suffer from omitted variable bias.JEL Classification: J12, C23

Parents’ living arrangement and the political and civic attitudes of 13- and 14-year-old children

“…Overall, our investigations support the findings from other European studies on the relations between civic and political attitudes and family form (Prokic/Dronkers 2009;Hener et al 2015;Voorpostel/Coffé 2014). Of course, our analysis is just a small step along a long road, but it suggests that parental separation affects more than just the wellbeing of children.…”

“…Although the measurement of the family form was very poor in the CivEd 1999 (it did not distinguish between stepparents and biological parents), it found some variation in the societal attitudes of children living in different family forms across different societies. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, Hener et al (2015) found a strong relationship between growing up in a "non-intact" family and children's civic, social, and political engagement as adults. They also showed that the duration of time spent in a "non-intact family" as a child has a negative effect on participation as a young adult.…”

Ethnic diversity and well-being

“…We follow the definition used in the GSOEP study by Hener et al (2016), who define an index of civic engagement as the aggregation of four components: political interest, party identification, organizational involvement and individual voluntarism. Interest in politics and party identification are in general associated with involvement in public matters.…”

Sin Taxes and Self-Control

“…whereṘ is the within R-squared from the baseline regression andR is the within Rsquared from the controlled regression. R max is the highest possible R-squared and is set to R max = min(2.2R, 1) following Hener et al (2019). Hence, the movement in coefficients is weighted by the movement in R-squared relative to the potential change in R-squared.…”