Political socialization | US government and civics | Khan Academy

What we're going to do in this video is think about how a person's environment or experiences affects their political perspective, their political attitude. So, one way to think about it is how is your socialization, your political socialization, how does that drive your political attitudes? I encourage you to pause this video, think about your own political leanings, whether you lean to the left or you lean to the right. Where did that come from? Was it just you in a vacuum thinking about things, or were you influenced by your family, your friends, your school? Maybe the media, maybe something that you're a part of, maybe a club, or a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple.

This is actually an area of study for political scientists, and as you can imagine, some of the things that I just mentioned are significant factors that people have studied in terms of what develops people's political attitudes. If you come from a family of staunch democrats, you're more likely to be a democrat or at least lean to the left. If the environment of your school or what you're exposed to in school leans one way or another, you are likely more likely to lean in that direction. If your friends go one direction or another, that could be a very powerful influence.

Obviously, what you're exposed to in the media, and out of all of these, the one that's maybe the most studied is the notion of family. To appreciate this idea, let's look at this diagram right over here. I encourage you to pause this video and see if you can make sense of this before we do that together.

All right, it says percentage intergenerational resemblance in partisan orientation, and this data is from 1992. So it shows three different scenarios: one scenario where we are looking at folks where both parents are democrats, another scenario where we're looking at folks where both parents are republicans, and then another scenario where there is no consistent partisanship among parents. So, either they are split or maybe they are independent.

Actually, if we look at this third scenario first, you see that it's a pretty symmetrical distribution. Green shows of people whose parents show no partisan preference: 17% are pure independent, about 18% lean towards the democrats, 16% lean to the republicans—that's about the same. 14% are weak democrats, 14% are weak republicans, 10% are strong democrats, 10% are strong republicans. So, it's a pretty balanced distribution here.

But then, if you look at the scenario where both parents are democrats, you see that of those folks, only—what is this? This is eight plus six is fourteen plus seven—only twenty-one percent are republicans. And if you go the other way where both parents are republicans, you have only 18% of those folks become democrats.

So, this is just interesting food for thought. A lot of us really like to believe, including myself, that hey, I've come to all these conclusions based on completely impartial thoughts about how the world should be. But we are influenced by our environment, and especially from our family. Frankly, even the folks who go in a different direction than their families, that might have been because of their family. Maybe they decide that, hey, dad always frustrated me one way or the other, so I'm going to go the other way, or I'm going to rebel a little bit and I'm going to go the other way because I am a free thinker. But even in that situation, you are being influenced by your environment.