Abstract
Little is known about the effect of adult experience on political attitude formation. Recent work on political and social change asks us to take on trust a quantum leap from personality and childhood experience to adult political preference and neither accounts for rapid political change nor acknowledges the variety of experience which may produce a spurious ‘time-lag’ effect in political response to change.
In this study the attitudes of divorced and separated people, a social group recently formed out of the existing adult population, are compared with those of persons without those attributes. The results show that a satisfactory theoretical model of political attitude formation must incorporate adult experience as an important determinant and distinguish carefully between social conditions in general and the specific social experience of individuals.
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