Parental Transmission and the Importance of the (Noncausal) Effects of Education on Political Engagement: Missing the Forest for the Trees

Abstract

By most accounts, an important prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy is engaged citizens. A very prominent explanation of variation in political engagement suggests that parental transmission through socialization accounts for individual-level differences in political engagement. In this paper, we show, using a large Danish twin survey (N = 2,071), that classic formulations of parental transmission theory can be supplemented by findings from the biopolitics literature, allowing us to disentangle when heritable factors are important and when socialization factors are important predictors of political engagement. We show that as the level of family politicization and consistency increases, the influence of genes decreases. We take this to imply that family socialization can compensate for (genetic) individual differences and foster increased political engagement. By only focusing on the “causal” effect of education, we are missing the forest for the trees.

Keywords

applied social psychology behavior genetics development

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alford

J. R.

Funk

Hibbing

J. R.

(2005). Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99(02), 153–167.

Andolina

Jenkins

Zukin

Keeter

(2003). Habits from home, lessons from school: Influences on youth civic engagement. Political Science and Politics, 36, 275–280.

Bandura

(1969). Social-learning theory of identificatory processes. In Goslin

D. A.

(Ed.), Handbook of socialization theory and research (pp. 213–262). Rand McNally.

Bandura

(1986). Social foundations of thought and action:: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.

Barth

Papageorge

N. W.

Thom

(2020). Genetic endowments and wealth inequality. Journal of Political Economy, 128(4), 1474–1522.

Belsky

D. W.

Domingue

B. W.

Wedow

Arseneault

Boardman

J. D.

Caspi

Conley

Fletcher

J. M.

Freese

Herd

Moffitt

T. E.

Poulton

Sicinski

Wertz

Harris

K. M.

(2018). Genetic analysis of social-class mobility in five longitudinal studies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(31), E7275–E7284.

Berinsky

Lenz

(2011). Education and political participation: Exploring the causal link. Political Behavior, 33, 357–373.

Bourdieu

(1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard University Press.

Brambor

Clark

W. R.

Golder

, (2006). Understanding interaction models: Improving empirical analyses. Political Analysis 14(1), 63–82.

10.

Campbell

D. E.

(2009). Civic engagement and education: An empirical test of the sorting model. American Journal of Political Science, 53(4), 771–786.

11.

Christensen

Petersen

Skytthe

Herskind

A. M.

McGue

Bingley

(2006). Comparison of academic performance of twins and singletons in adolescence: Follow-up study. British Medical Journal, 333(7578), 1095.

12.

Converse

P. E.

(1972). Change in the American electorate. In Campbell

Converse

P. E.

(Eds.), The human meaning of social change (pp. 263–339). Russel SAGE Foundation.

13.

Damian

R. I.

Shanahan

Trautwein

Roberts

B. W.

(2015). Can personality traits and intelligence compensate for background disadvantage? Predicting status attainment in adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), 473–489.

14.

Dinesen

P. T.

Dawes

C. T.

Johannesson

Klemmensen

Magnusson

Nørgaard

A. S.

Petersen

Oskarsson

(2016). Estimating the impact of education on political participation: Evidence from monozygotic twins in the United States, Denmark and Sweden. Political Behavior, 38(3), 579–601.

15.

Enders

C. K.

(2010). Applied missing data analysis. Guilford Press.

16.

Fowler

J. H.

Baker

L. A.

Dawes

C. T.

(2008). Genetic variation in political participation. American Political Science Review, 102(2), 233–248.

17.

Hallquist

M. N.

Wiley

J. F.

(2018). MplusAutomation: An R package for facilitating large-scale latent variable analyses in Mplus. Structural Equation Modeling, 25(4), 621–638. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705511.2017.1402334. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10705511.2017.1402334

18.

Highton

(2009). Revisiting the relationship between educational attainment and political sophistication. Journal of Politics, 71(4), 1564–1576.

19.

Hyman

(1959). Political socialization. Free Press.

20.

Jennings

M. K.

Niemi

R. G.

(1968). The transmission of political values from parent to child. The American Political Science Review, 62(1), 169–184.

21.

Jennings

M. K.

Niemi

R. G.

(1981). Generations and politics a panel study of young adults and their parents. Princeton University Press.

22.

Jennings

M. K.

Stoker

Bowers

(2009). Politics across generations: Family transmission reexamined. Journal of Politics, 71(3), 782–799.

23.

Johnson

Deary

I. J.

Silventoinen

Tynelius

Rasmussen

(2010). Family background buys an education in Minnesota but not in Sweden. Psychological Science, 21(9), 1266–1273.

24.

Kam

Palmer

(2008). Reconsidering the effects of education on political participation. Journal of Politics, 70(3), 612–631.

25.

Klemmensen

Hobolt

S. B.

Dinesen

P. T.

Skytthe

Nørgaard

A. S.

(2012). The Danish political twin study: Political traits in Danish twins and the general population. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 15(01), 74–78.

26.

Lindgren

Oskarsson

Persson

(2019). Enhancing electoral equality: Can education compensate for family background differences in voting participation? American Political Science Review, 113(1), 108–122.

27.

Loftus

G. R.

(1978). On interpretation of interactions. Memory & Cognition, 6(3), 312–319.

28.

McGue

Bouchard

T. J.

(1984). Adjustment of twin data for the effects of age and sex. Behavior Genetics, 14(4), 325–343.

29.

McGue

Willoughby

E. A.

Rustichini

Johnson

Iacono

W. G.

Lee

J. J.

(2020). The contribution of cognitive and noncognitive skills to intergenerational social mobility. Psychological Science, 31(7), 835–847.

30.

McIntosh

Hart

Youniss

(2007). The influence of family political discussion on youth civic development: Which parent qualities matter? PS: Political Science & Politics, 40(3), 495–499.

31.

Muthén

L. K.

Muthén

B. O.

(2017). Mplus user’s guide (8th ed.). Muthén & Muthén.

32.

Neale

M. C. C. L.

Cardon

L. R.

(2013). Methodology for genetic studies of twins and families (Vol. 67). Springer Science & Business Media.

33.

Neundorf

Niemi

R. G.

Smets

(2016). The compensation effect of civic education on political engagement: How civics classes make up for missing parental socialization. Political Behavior, 38(4), 921–949.

34.

Niemi

R. G.

Craig

S. C.

Mattei

(1991). Measuring internal political efficacy in the 1988 National Election Study. American Political Science Review, 85, 1407–1413.

35.

Oskarsson

Ahlskog

Dawesand

Lindgren

(2020). Persistent inequalities: The origins of intergenerational associations in voter turnout. https://conpol.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AdoptionPaper.pdf

36.

Oskarsson

Dawes

C. T.

Lindgren

(2018). It runs in the family. Political Behavior, 40(4), 883–908.

37.

Oskarsson

Dinesen

P. T.

Dawes

C. T.

Johannesson

Magnusson

P. K. E.

(2017). Education and social trust: Testing a causal hypothesis using the discordant twin design. Political Psychology, 38(3), 515–531.

38.

Persson

(2015). Education and political participation. British Journal of Political Science, 45(03), 689–703.

39.

Purcell

(2002). Variance components models for Gene–Environment interaction in Twin Analysis. Twin Research, 5(6), 554–571.

40.

Rasmussen

S. H. R.

(2016). Education or personality traits and intelligence as determinants of political knowledge? Political Studies, 64(4), 1036–1054.

41.

Rasmussen

S. H. R.

Ludeke

Hjelmborg

J. V.

(2019). A major limitation of the direction of causation model: Non-shared environmental confounding. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 22, 14–26.

42.

Rasmussen

S. H. R.

Weinschenk

Nørgaard

A. S.

von Bornemann Hjelmborg

Klemmensen

(2021). Educational attainment has a causal effect on economic, but not social ideology: Evidence from discordant twins. Political Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211008788

43.

Robinson

(2020). Education, family background, and political knowledge: A test of the compensation hypothesis with identical twins. Political Studies, 68(2), 350–369.

44.

Turkheimer

Harden

K. P.

(2014). Behavior genetic research methods: Testing quasi-causal hypotheses using multivariate twin data. In Reis

H. T.

Judd

C. M.

(Eds.), Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology (2nd ed., pp. 159–187). Cambridge University Press.

45.

Weinschenk

A. C.

Dawes

C. T.

(2019). The effect of education on political knowledge: Evidence from monozygotic twins. American Politics Research, 47(3), 530–548.

46.

Wickham

(2016). ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. Springer-Verlag. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org

47.

Willeck

Mendelberg

(2022). Education and political participation. Annual Review of Political Science, 25, 89–110. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci

48.

Willoughby

E. A.

Giannelis

Ludeke

Klemmensen

Nørgaard

A. S.

Iacono

W. G.

Lee

J. J.

McGue

(2021). Parent contributions to the development of political attitudes in adoptive and biological families. Psychological Science, 32(12), 2023–2034.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.23 MB