Political socialisation of second generation young adults in the UK

This paper looks into determinants of political socialisation of young adults born to migrant-origin parents in the UK. From the general literature we know that political socialisation at home happens directly through teaching and indirectly through modelling of parental behaviour. However, there is lack of evidence on how political socialisation happens in immigrant-origin families, where parental political behaviour is shaped by characteristics of both the origin country and the destination country. We use Understanding Society, a novel, longitudinal dataset from the UK that allows us to directly observe the behaviour and attitudes of migrant-origin parents as well as their children. We apply Luthra et al.’s (2018) recently developed international perspective of immigrant integration by linking aggregate data on sending country characteristics to individual level data on immigrant-origin parents and their children to examine multidimensional determinants of the second generation’s political outcomes. In particular, we look at: sending country characteristics (Polity Autocracy-Democracy Index, Corruption Index, GDP, voter turnout; whether a sending country was a former British colony); context of reception (aggregate education level of immigrants from each sending country, level of hostility towards particular group); legal status of the parents (whether parent naturalised and how long they have lived in the UK), as well as parents’ and children’s own socio-demographic characteristics. First, we show that political behaviour of children in migrant families is less strongly predicted by their parents’ political behaviour compared to their counterparts in non-migrant families. When we look at the sending country factors, we find that political interest is, as expected, positively associated with the condition of democracy in the sending country (for parents), and having a more politically interested parent results in higher political interest of children. Interestingly, we find the opposite sending country effect for parental voting behaviour. First generation parents who come from more democratic countries are, on average, less likely to vote and so are their children. This result is strongly related to the colonial ties of sending countries in the UK. Parents who come from former colonies (especially Commonwealth countries), due strong links with Britain and the familiarity with the British system, are much more likely to vote than first-generation parents who come from other countries. The colonial ties and ethnic mobilisation of first-generation parents also translate into higher voting participation of their children. This means that, unlike in the general population, voting behaviour is driven more by co-ethnic mobilisation and the norm to participate in electoral politics and less driven by the general political interest. We also find some indication that the reported ethnic and racial harassment on the group level has the opposite effect for political interest and electoral behaviour, further suggesting that, in the UK context, there is no straight-forward relationship between political awareness and electoral participation among people with immigrant-origin background.