Political Socialization and Voting: The Parent-Child Link in Turnout

Status transmission theory represents an important challenge to social learning theory, but its generalizability may be limited to countries where there is a strong intergenerational correlation in educational attainment. Based on a unique data set that matches register data from the 1999 Finnish parliamentary elections with individual-level data provided by Statistics Finland for a sample of eighteen-to thirty-year-olds and their parents, we assess these two explanations for unequal turnout. We first show that parental education does affect the turnout of young adults, as predicted by status transmission theory. However, parental voting rather than the transmission of education from parent to child appears to be the more important mediating factor. We then go on to demonstrate that there is a strong association between parental voting and the turnout of their adult children that is independent of the effects of parental education. More detailed tests of a number of implications derived from social learning theory reinforce our conclusion that the theory offers a superior explanation in countries where there is not a strong parent-child link in educational attainment.