The Formation of Young People’s Political Beliefs in Turbulent Times

Abstract

The question of how individuals’ political attitudes and beliefs come to be has intrigued social scientists for many decades and continues to attract a great deal of scholarly attention. Socio-economic accounts of political behavior, for example, provide the basis for many studies, repeatedly finding that people with more resources, whether income, education, social networks, or a combination thereof, tend to participate more in politics than people with fewer. A related strand of the literature, political socialization, focusses on the formative influences of the family environment and experiences in late adolescent/early adulthood for people’s political attitudes. This panel expands on these literatures with studies examining how crucial experiences such as unemployment, social mobility, or economic insecurity impact young adults’ political attitudes and behaviors. Such experiences are very much thought to leave their marks on how young people think about and participate in politics. Moreover, today’s young people are arguably exposed to a different set of risks and uncertainty than their parents faced when they were coming of political age. Drawing on innovative, new data sources, the papers will therefore pay close attention to how the experiences of uncertainty and precariousness imprint on young people’s political dispositions and attitude as well as to the social-psychological processes of political attitude and value transmission within families.