Outline how various forms of socialization shape political opinions.
Central to the formation of public opinion is political socialization, or “the process through which an individual acquires his or her particular political orientations—his or her knowledge, feelings, and evaluations regarding his or her political world.”13 As people become more socialized with age, their political orientations grow firmer. Thus, governments typically aim their socialization efforts largely at the young. Authoritarian regimes are particularly concerned with indoctrinating their citizens at an early age. For example, youth in the former Soviet Union were organized into the Komsomol—the Young Communist League. Membership in these groups was helpful in gaining admission to college and entering certain occupations. In the Komsomol, Soviet youth were taught their government’s view of the advantages of communism (though apparently not well enough to keep the system going). Political socialization is a much more subtle process in the United States.
Only a small portion of Americans’ political learning is formal. Civics or government classes in high school teach citizens some of the nuts and bolts of government—how many senators each state has, what presidents do, and so on. But such formal socialization is only the tip of the iceberg. Americans do most of their political learning without teachers or classes.
Informal learning is really much more important than formal, in-class learning about politics. Most of this informal socialization is almost accidental. Few parents sit down with their children and say, “Johnny, let us tell you why we’re Republicans.” Instead, the informal socialization process might be best described by words like pick up and absorb.
The family, the media, and the schools all serve as important agents of political socialization. We look at each in turn.
The family’s role in socialization is central because of its monopoly on two crucial resources in the early years: time and emotional commitment. If your parents are interested in politics, chances are you will be also, as your regular interactions with them will expose you to the world of politics as you are growing up. Furthermore, children often pick up their political leanings from the attitudes of their parents. Most students in an American government class like to think of themselves as independent thinkers, especially when it comes to politics. Yet one can predict how the majority of young people will vote simply by knowing the party identification of their parents.14
Some degree of adolescent rebellion against parents and their beliefs does take place. Witnessing the outpouring of youthful rebellion in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many people thought a generation gap was opening up. Supposedly, radical youth condemned their backward-thinking parents. Although such a gap occurred in some families, the overall evidence for it was slim. For example, eight years after Jennings and Niemi first interviewed a sample of high school seniors and their parents in the mid-1960s, they still found far more agreement than disagreement across the generational divide.15 Recent research has demonstrated that one of the reasons for the long-lasting impact of parental influence on political attitudes is simply genetics. In one study, Alford, Funk, and Hibbing compared the political opinions of identical twins and nonidentical twins.16 If the political similarity between parents and children is due just to environmental factors, then the identical twins should agree on political issues to about the same extent the nonidentical twins do, as in both cases the twins are raised in the same environment. However, if genetics are an important factor, then identical twins, who are genetically the same, should agree with one another more often than nonidentical twins, who are not. On all the political questions they examined, there was substantially more agreement between the identical twins—clearly demonstrating that genetics play an important role in shaping political attitudes.
The mass media are the “new parent,” according to many observers. Average grade-school youngsters spend more time each week watching television than they spend at school. And television displaces parents as the chief source of information as children get older.
Unfortunately, today’s generation of young adults is significantly less likely to watch television news and read newspapers than their elders. Many studies have attributed the relative lack of political knowledge of today’s youth to their media consumption or, more appropriately, to their lack of it.17 In 1965, Gallup found virtually no difference between age groups in frequency of following politics through the media. In recent years, however, a considerable age gap has opened up, with older people paying the most attention to the news and young adults the least. The median age of viewers of CBS, ABC, and NBC news programs in 2012 was 63—18 years older than the audience for a typical prime-time program. If you have ever turned on the TV news and wondered why so many of the commercials seem to be for various prescription drugs, now you know why.
Political socialization is as important to a government as it is to an individual. Governments, including our own, often use schools to promote national loyalty and support for their basic values. In most American schools, the day begins with the Pledge of Allegiance. As part of promoting support for the basic values of the system, American children have long been successfully educated about the virtues of free enterprise and democracy.
Any democracy has a vested interest in students’ learning the positive features of their political system because this helps ensure that youth will grow up to be supportive citizens. David Easton and Jack Dennis have argued that “those children who begin to develop positive feelings toward the political authorities will grow into adults who will be less easily disenchanted with the system than those children who early acquire negative, hostile sentiments.”18 Of course, this is not always the case. Well-socialized youths of the 1960s led the opposition to the American regime and the war in Vietnam. It could be argued, however, that even these protestors had been positively shaped by the socialization process, for the goal of most activists was to make the system more democratically responsive rather than to change American government radically. Most American schools are public schools, financed by the government. Their textbooks are often chosen by the local and state boards, and teachers are certified by the state government. Schooling is perhaps the most obvious intrusion of the government into Americans’ socialization. And education does exert a profound influence on a variety of political attitudes and behavior. Better-educated citizens are more likely to vote in elections, they exhibit more knowledge about politics and public policy, and they are more tolerant of opposing (even radical) opinions.
The payoffs of schooling thus extend beyond better jobs and better pay. Educated citizens also more closely approximate the model of a democratic citizen. A formal civics course may not make much difference, but the whole context of education does. As Albert Einstein once said, “Schools need not preach political doctrine to defend democracy. If they shape men and women capable of critical thought and trained in social attitudes, that is all that is necessary.”
Political learning does not, of course, end when one reaches 18 or even when one graduates from college. Politics is a lifelong activity. Because America is an aging society, it is important to consider the effects of growing older on political learning and behavior.
Aging increases political participation as well as strength of party attachment. Young adults lack experience with politics. Because political behavior is to some degree learned behavior, there is some learning yet to do. Political participation rises steadily with age until the infirmities of old age make it harder to participate, as can be seen in Figure 6.2. Similarly, strength of party identification increases as people often develop a pattern of usually voting for one party or the other.
Politics, like most other things, is thus a learned behavior. Americans learn to vote, to pick a political party, and to evaluate political events in the world around them. One of the products of all this learning is what is known as public opinion.
In the 2010 congressional elections, as in most midterm elections, the relationship between age and turnout was particularly pronounced, as you can see in this figure. Because today’s young adults lean in the liberal direction, political analysts concluded that the low turnout rate of young people cost the Democrats a substantial number of seats in the House and Senate in 2010.
SOURCE: Authors’ analysis of 2010 Census Bureau data.