Why do people think and act politically in the manner they do? Despite the foundational nature of this question, answers are unfortunately incomplete and unnecessarily tentative, largely because political scientists do not take seriously the possibility of nonenvironmental influences. The suggestion that people could be born with political predispositions strikes many as far-fetched, odd, even perverse. However, researchers in other disciplines—‐ notably behavioral genetics—‐have uncovered a substantial heritable component for many social attitudes and behaviors and it seems unlikely that political attitudes and behaviors are completely immune from such forces. In this article, we combine relevant findings in behavioral genetics with our own analysis of data on a large sample of twins to test the hypothesis that, contrary to the assumptions embedded in political science research, political attitudes have genetic as well as environmental causes. 1

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=poliscifacpub

Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted

This paper reframes our inquiry into voter turnout by making aging the lens through which the traditional resource and cost measures of previous turnout research are viewed, thereby making three related contributions. (1) I offer a developmental theory of turnout. This framework follows from the observation that most citizens are habitual voters or habitual nonvoters (they display inertia). Most young citizens start their political lives as habitual nonvoters but they vary in how long it takes to develop into habitual voters. With this transition at the core of the framework, previous findings concerning costs and resources can easily be integrated into developmental theory. (2) I make a methodological contribution by applying latent growth curve models to panel data. (3) Finally, the empirical analyses provide the developmental theory with strong support and also provide a better understanding of the roles of aging, parenthood, partisanship, and geographic mobility.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/9EA1F561496D714346491B25B0D52239/S0003055402004227a.pdf/becoming-a-habitual-voter-inertia-resources-and-growth-in-young-adulthood.pdf

Becoming a Habitual Voter: Inertia, Resources, and Growth in Young Adulthood

Students of public opinion research have argued that voters show very little consistency and structure in their political attitudes. A model of the survey response is proposed which takes account of the vagueness in opinion survey questions and in response categories. When estimates are made of this vagueness or “measurement error” and the estimates applied to the principal previous study, nearly all the inconsistency is shown to be the result of the vagueness of the questions rather than of any failure by the respondents.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055400245012

Mass Political Attitudes and the Survey Response

The persistence hypothesis holds that core political predispositions tend to be highly stable through the life span. It has rarely been tested directly, given the scarcity of long-term, large-sample longitudinal studies. We address it using the Terman longitudinal study, in which the party identification and ideology of 1,272 respondents were measured on four occasions between 1940 and 1977, from roughly age 30 to retirement age. These partisan attitudes were highly stable over this long period, yielding continuity coefficients of about 80 between each measurement (separated by at least 10 years), and 65 for the full 37-year span. Examination of the trajectories of individual attitudes reveals that the most common pattern was constancy across time. A substantial minority changed in small but consistent ways, but changes from one partisan side to the other were not very common. Surprisingly, early-life racial attitudes had a resurgent effect on partisan attitudes in the 1970s. There was evidence of increas...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2647773.pdf

Evidence of the Long-Term Persistence of Adults' Political Predispositions

We propose that (1) the preadult socialization of longstanding, stable predispositions is catalyzed by exogenous political events; (2) such events socialize attitudes selectively, only in the specific domains they make salient; and so (3) longstanding predispositions tend to be socialized episodically rather than incrementally. This theory is applied to the socialization of partisanship during a presidential campaign, examining gains in information, affective expression, and attitude crystallization. Adolescents (aged 10 to 17) and their parents were interviewed in a three-wave panel study, at the beginning of a presidential campaign, at the end, and a year later. The campaign induced substantial preadult socialization gains regarding attitude objects central to the campaign (candidates and parties), particularly in the stability of preadults' partisanship. There were few gains in attitude domains peripheral to the campaign or during the postcampaign period. These findings suggest that periodic political events catalyze preadult socialization, generating predispositions that persist into later life stages.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055400231018

Politics Matters: Political Events as Catalysts for Preadult Socialization

This paper assesses the theoretical significance of data on childhood political learning. Two socialization models are involved. Each confers relevance on childhood learning by linking it with political outcomes. The first is an allocative politics model, which seeks a linkage with policy outputs. The other is a system persistence model, looking toward the stability and continued existence of political systems. Each model incorporates the following assumptions: (a) the primacy principle: childhood learning is relatively enduring throughout life; (b) the structuring principle: basic orientations acquired during childhood structure the later learning of specific issue beliefs.It is this structuring principle which we examined and tested in the present paper. The data show no or little association between childhood orientations and the later learning of specific beliefs about the most important political issues of the day. Our evidence suggests a need to carefully reexamine the basic assumptions and directions of current political socialization research.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1958774.pdf

Alden E. Lind

Papers

The Structuring Principle: Political Socialization and Belief Systems

Mathematical Applications in Political Science, II. Ed. By Joseph L. Bernd. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1966. Pp. 208. $4.95.)