Adolescents today are just as politically polarized as adults; & they are much more likely to share their parents' political orientation than they were 4 decades ago

Learning to Dislike Your Opponents: Political Socialization in the Era of Polarization. Matthew Tyler, Shanto Iyengar. American Political Science Review, Volume 117, Issue 1, February 2023, online May 4 2022, pp. 347 - 354. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542200048X

Abstract: Early socialization research dating to the 1960s showed that children could have a partisan identity without expressing polarized evaluations of political leaders and institutions. We provide an update to the socialization literature by showing that adolescents today are just as polarized as adults. We compare our findings to a landmark 1980 socialization study and show that distrust in the opposing party has risen sharply among adolescents. We go on to show that the onset of polarization in childhood is predicted by parental influence; adolescents who share their parents’ identity and whose parents are more polarized are apt to voice polarized views.

CONCLUSION

We have shown that the onset of partisan polarization occurs early in the life cycle. Today, high levels of in-group favoritism and out-group distrust are in place well before early adulthood. In fact, the absence of age differences in our 2019 results suggests that the learning curve for polarization plateaus by the age of 11. This is very unlike the developmental pattern that held in the 1970s and 1980s, when early childhood was characterized by blanket positivity toward political leaders and partisanship gradually intruded into the political attitudes of adolescents before peaking in adulthood.

When we considered the antecedents of children’s trust in the parties, our findings confirm the earlier literature documenting the primacy of the family as an agent of socialization (Jennings and Niemi Reference Jennings and Niemi1968; Jennings, Stoker, and Bowers Reference Jennings, Stoker and Bowers2009; Tedin Reference Tedin1974). Polarized parents seem to transmit not only their partisanship but also their animus toward opponents. It is striking that the least-polarized youth respondents in 2019 are those who have not adopted their parental partisan loyalty.

In closing, our findings have important implications for the study of political socialization. Fifty years ago, political socialization was thought to play a stabilizing role important to the perpetuation of democratic norms and institutions. In particular, children’s adoption of uncritical attitudes toward political leaders helped to legitimize the entire democratic regime. Indeed, researchers cited this “functional” role of socialization in justifying the study of political attitudes in childhood (Kinder and Sears Reference Kinder, Sears, Lindzey and Aronson1985; van Deth, Abendschön, and Vollmar Reference van Deth, Abendschön and Vollmar2011).

In the current era, it seems questionable whether the early acquisition of out-party animus fosters democratic norms and civic attitudes. Extreme polarization is now associated with rampant misinformation (Peterson and Iyengar Reference Peterson and Iyengar2021) and, as indicated by the events that occurred in the aftermath of the 2020 election, with willingness to reject the outcome of free and fair electoral procedures. The question for future research is how to transmit party attachments, as occurred in the prepolarization era, without the accompanying distrust and disdain for political opponents.