Political Socialization in Immigrant Families: Evidence from South Korea

• In Event: Globalisation and Citizenship

Proposal

Political socialization refers to the process through which individuals acquire their particular political orientations, i.e., their knowledge, attitudes regarding the political world, and participatory orientations (Dawson et al., 1977, 33). The traditional literature on political socialization suggests that one important way that individuals are exposed to the political world is through the unidirectional intergenerational transmission of political orientations, from parent to child (Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993). Because parents’ resources (e.g., economic resources, human capital, and cultural capital) are associated with access to and effectiveness of political learning in the home, inequality in family political socialization is thought to contribute to rather stable trajectories of political apathy or involvement and lay the foundations for unequal participation from before voting age and far into adulthood (Verba, Burns, and Schlozman, 2003; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady, 2012; Jungkunz & Marx, 2023).

Additionally, while often overlooked in the middle of the public attention paid to academic achievement of students, schooling has a civic dimension to ensure a democratic culture in society. In tandem with the civic mission of schools, several studies consistently demonstrate that education—as indicated by the amount of schooling in years or degrees—is the most important predictor of political attitudes and behavior (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980, Verba, Schlozman et al. 1995). Moreover, a considerable body of research indicates that civic learning at school—as measured by classroom climate (Campbell 2008, Persson 2015), pedagogical techniques (Gainous and Martens 2012, Kawashima-Ginsberg and Levine 2014), extracurricular activities (McFarland and Thomas 2006, Hart, Donnelly et al. 2007) and service learning (Hunter and Brisbin 2000, Metz and Youniss 2005), among others—can make a difference in political attitudes and behavior (Campbell 2019). Of particular importance in this line of burgeoning research is the accumulated evidence that the schooling process has the largest effects on students who are socially disadvantaged and has the potential to mitigate the class and ethnic bias in the political realm (Campbell 2008, Castillo, Miranda et al. 2015, Neundorf, Niemi et al. 2016, Hoskins, Janmaat et al. 2017). This compensation effect was already captured in Langton and Jennings (1968)’s study, which found that high school civics courses had more positive impacts on African American students than on their white counterparts, and later replicated in Ehman (1970) and Rodgers (1973). In these studies, the compensatory potential of civic education has been explained in terms of redundancy—while schooling simply repeats the same political socialization messages sent by parents, such messages are missing for the socially disadvantaged and thus compensate for a relative lack of political socialization in the home.

At the same time, there is growing evidence that challenges the traditional view of political socialization, arguing that children can influence and change the political attitudes and behavior of their parents by initiating political discussions at home (McDevitt & Chaffee, 2002, 2006; Wong & Tseng, 2008). In this trickle-up or bidirectional view of political socialization, when children initiate discussions about politics with their parents, parents would seek more political information and express more political opinions; when children appear confident in discussing politics with their parents, parents may respond by trying to increase their own knowledge of politics to maintain their authority within the family. Furthermore, when child-initiated discussion is stimulated by civics curriculum in the school, this prompts the parent to increase her civic competence via increased new media use, knowledge gain, and opinion formation, pointing to the compensatory role of school-based civic learning in political socialization (McDevitt & Chaffee, 2002). This is especially true within immigrant families, where parents are less familiar with politics in the host country than their children who quickly become proficient in the host country language and exposed the mainstream culture through schooling. Because of the linguistic and cultural proficiencies, immigrant children and children of immigrants play a crucial role in assisting families in settling and adapting to their newly found home (Valenzuela, 1999; Tseng, 2004).

With few exceptions in US-based studies (Linimon & Josly, 2002; Saphir & Chaffe, 2002; McDevitt & Chaffee, 2002; Wong & Tseng, 2008), however, researchers have rarely examined the influence of families and schools in the political socialization process among immigrants. Rather, scholars of immigrant political socialization have focused on the role of media such as television and SNS in socializing immigrants and their children in the host country’s politics. Moreover, we also view the lack of attention to other societies outside the US as a major gap in the literature on immigrant political socialization. Facing the phenomenon surge of international migration over the past two decades, not only traditional immigrant-receiving countries like the US, but also previously immigrant-sending countries like South Korea (Korea, hereafter) have been the popular destination for immigrants. In efforts to address Korea’s impending demographic crisis—the total fertility rate is currently 0.8 in Korea—the Korean government has taken various measures, including implementing a formal guest worker program and accepting marriage migrants from around the world (especially Southeast Asia, China, and Russia). As a result, Korea’s total foreign population has grown around fourteen-fold from less than 180,000 in 1995 to over 2.6 million in 2022. It is also important to note that Korea is characterized by relatively high levels of income inequality (OECD, 2022) and growing socioeconomic disparities in children’s outcomes (Byun & Kim, 2010).

Against this backdrop, the overarching goal of our study is to fill the important gap in the immigration literature by examining the bidirectional roles between parents and children in the political socialization process and the compensatory role of school-based civic learning in the context of immigrant families in Korea. Data on political socialization within immigrant families in Korea was collected through face-to face surveys and in-depth interviews. As late adolescence and early adulthood are critical stages for developing political orientations (Arnett, 2001), the target sample included first- (N= 124) and second-generation (N = 53) adolescents (18-25 years old) and their immigrant parents. Based on preliminary findings, this study raises important questions and offers important insights about how political learning takes place in immigrant families in and above Korea.

Authors

• HYUNGRYEOL KIM, Seoul National University

• Kahyeon Yu