Passing political views to the next generation: Insights from the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study

Source citation:

• Jenkins, C. M. (in press 2026). “On ideological consistency and the intergenerational transmission of political attitudes.” Political Behavior.

In this paper, author Clinton M. Jenkins demonstrated that parents with highly consistent liberal or conservative views (who show “ideological constraint”) are significantly more likely to pass along their political attitudes and beliefs to their children, compared to parents with less idealogical constraint. Jenkins’ findings are based on his analysis of multi-generational longitudinal data from the Youth-Parent Socialization Study, the first wave of which surveyed a national sample of over 1,600 US high school seniors and their parents in 1965. The study followed up with the original students and parents in three additional waves in 1973, 1982, and 1997. Jenkins paired the first and second generation data from the 1973 wave and the second and third generation data from 1997 wave to create parent-child dyads that allowed him to observe political attitudes and socialization across three generations. The studies that Jenkins used are part of the Youth Studies Series, distributed by ICPSR’s Member Archive. More publications that analyze the data from studies in that series can be found here.

Posted February 26, 2036