Greece has always been the exemplary case of political socialization, whereby values, political beliefs and opinions are transmitted from one generation to the other through the family and other socializing institutions. This pattern has been challenged recently by the seeming failure of the political system. How do young people react in front of this development? A Bayesian model, drawing on Hirschman’s exit-voice-loyalty framework, helps to classify this essentially heterogeneous group into three categories: for some young Greeks, attutudinal updating in the light of this new information implies increasing sentiments of political apathy. For others, the crisis signals the failure of the existing party system and the need to engage in new forms of political involvement. Finally, a part of this group sees the country’s entrance in the EU-IMF mechanism of support as a loss of sovereignty, which in turn reinforces latent populist sentiments, evolving around what students of Greek politics call a defensive (or underdog) culture. Interestingly, this trichotomy does not seem to overlap with ideological or prior partisan divisions. It rather seems to embed more profound dissimilarities related to the socialization processes of the Greek youth. Combining observational information with experimental manipulation, though a survey experiment administered across university students in early 2011, I delve into the social roots of these processes. The potentially confounding effect of education is accounted for by the design. In so doing, I attempt to shed light on the following questions: what is the role of the family in this diversity? More specifically, how does parent-child similarity in political attitudes manifest itself in the variation of the degree and forms of political participation among the children? Finally, does it matter to offspring civic orientations if their parents develop a distrust of government during the child’s early adulthood? With all its particularities, the Greek case provides an interesting setting for the investigation of the role of the primary pillar of political socialization, namely the family, in the process of political learning.
