Youth with Migration Backgrounds and Political Engagement: Intergenerational Transmissions, Political (Re)socialization, and Inequalities

Abstract

Classical theories of political socialization emphasize intergenerational value continuity, yet research on immigrant families highlights possible disruptions in the standard model of political learning (Borkowska and Luthra (2024). While foreign-born parents often face structural barriers in host societies, their children—socialized through schools, peers, and civic norms—often develop different political perspectives that diverge from those of their parents. This raises important questions about intergenerational (mis)alignment, hybrid identities, and the ways in which migrant youth negotiate belonging and citizenship. At the same time, despite the growing number of young people living outside their country of birth, their political engagement remains under-examined. Understanding how they engage with politics, activism, and everyday performative forms of citizenship is therefore crucial for debates on democratic inclusion and political equality. Existing research identifies several micro-level mechanisms to explain variation in migrants’ political participation. In particular, three “resocialization” theories—exposure, transferability, and resilience—have been particularly influential in explaining how migrants adjust to new political environments (White et al., 2008; Voicu & Comşa, 2014). Exposure theory links adaptation to the duration and intensity of contact with the host-country political environment, whereas resilience theory stresses the enduring impact of political orientations formed prior to migration. Transferability theory adds a dynamic dimension, arguing that migrants can redeploy previously acquired political skills and knowledge in new institutional settings. To disentangle cultural from institutional effects, scholars increasingly rely on the epidemiological approach, which treats culture as portable and compares immigrants from different origins within the same host context to isolate the influence of cultural legacies on political attitudes and behavior (Polavieja, 2015). Against this background, this panel aims to investigate migrant youth political participation across local and national levels, and through single-case and comparative designs. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following questions: • How does the political engagement of migrant youth differ from that of their native peers and their parents? • What forms of value continuity or disruption emerge in intergenerational political socialization within migrant families? • How do migrant youth engage in everyday and non-electoral forms of citizenship such as volunteering, protest, or digital activism? • How do legal status, access to rights, and national discourses on migration and national identity shape their opportunities for civic and political participation? We particularly encourage submissions that draw on cross-national or longitudinal survey data, original survey experiments, and mixed-method approaches.

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