From Generation to Generation: The Role of Grandparents in the Intergenerational Transmission of (Non-)Voting

Abstract

The literature on the reproduction of political participation across generations has focused almost exclusively on parental effects. Yet, other family members may plausibly play an important role as well. This study explores the role of grandparents in the intergenerational transmission of the propensity to vote. Grandparental effects are theorized in terms of both social learning and status transmission. The analysis takes advantage of a unique dataset that links official turnout data for grandparents, parents, and adult grandchildren with demographic and socioeconomic information from administrative sources. Even controlling for a variety of status-related characteristics, grandchildren are significantly less likely to vote when their grandparents are non-voters. The association between grandparental turnout and the turnout of their adult grandchildren is only partly explained by the mediating effect of parental turnout. Having non-voting grandparents appears to reinforce the effect of having parents who do not vote and may even offset the effects of having parents who are both voters. These results suggest that it is time to take the role of grandparents seriously if we want to understand how political disadvantage is transmitted across generations.

The Perpetuity of the Past: Transmission of Political Inequality across Multiple Generations

“…Understanding the mechanisms underlying the intergenerational persistence of political outlooks and behavior requires paying closer attention to the role played by nonparental relatives in the process of political socialization. There are some signs that researchers are beginning to do this (see e.g., Aggeborn and Nyman 2021;Gidengil et al 2021;Lahtinen, Erola, and Wass 2019), but we hope to see more work along these lines in the future.…”

“…However, the results presented in Table 2, as well as in the study by Gidengil et al (2021), raise the question of whether it suffices to consider three generations or whether we need to extend the model even further if we are to measure the intergenerational persistence in voting accurately. In an attempt to shed light on this issue, Table 3 displays the results for a set of analyses based on the subset of our main sample for which we can observe the voting behavior of four consecutive generations.…”

“…First, the two studies have rather different empirical foci. For instance, Gidengil et al (2021) attempt to determine whether it is voting or nonvoting grandparents who exert greater influence on their grandchildren's voting habits. In contrast, we treat voting and nonvoting as two sides of the same coin because we focus on intergenerational transmission coefficients in voting.…”

“…Moreover, as Gidengil et al (2021) point out in a recent study, previous research has been too limited in another respect as well: it has been almost entirely dominated by a two-generation view of intergenerational influence (Mare 2011). That is, the sole focus has been on studying the transmission from parents to their children, whereas the potential effects of grandparents and other forebears have been neglected.…”

Здійснення Громадянином Політичного Вибору Залежно Від Образів Членів Родини

“…Загалом, у зарубіжній політичній психології ролі сім'ї у політичному виборі та виборчій поведінці приділяється велика увага. Показано навіть вплив політичної поведінки дідусів та бабусь на політичну поведінку їх онуків: онуки зі значно меншою ймовірністю взагалі з'являться на вибори, якщо їх дідусь та бабуся вважають, що ухилення від голосування вдала стратегія (Gidengil, Lahtinen, Wass & Erola, 2020).…”