Parent Encouragement and Young Adult Voting Behavior

• In Event: Family and Political Behavior

Abstract

Recent concerns over an increasingly polarized political system and the changing nature of youth engagement in political life has turned attention back to political socialization research and the importance of understanding what drives young people to electoral engagement. While it is clear that there is a strong relationship between parent and child voting, the role of parent encouragement, or verbal instruction, remains less clear. Using a potential outcomes approach to causality, this study seeks to isolate the causal effect of parent encouragement to vote on young adult turnout and informed voting behaviors, and finds that, after conditioning on factors that determine selection into treatment, parent encouragement increases likelihood of voting by 28%, and increases scores on a 6-point informed voting index by 1.00. This supports a social learning theory of political replication, and demonstrates the large role that parents play in determining youth engagement, while beginning to develop a more complete causal framework for how and why young people come to be active participants in public life.

Author

• Kelly Siegel-Stechler, Johns Hopkins University