Replication Data for: The Role of Child Perception and Motivation in Political Socialization

Most of what we know regarding political socialization treats parent-child concordance as evidence of transmission. This direct-transmission approach however, remains agnostic about how socialization occurs, whether traits have a role in a child’s ability to identify and understand their parent’s values or the child’s motivation to adopt their parent’s values. Here we advance a perception-adoption approach that unpacks theses microprocesses of socialization. We test the implications of our model using three independent studies in the United States; the Youth-Parent Socialization Study, the Health and Lifestyle Study, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Together they comprise 4,852 parent-child dyads with unique measures of self-declared values and the perception of each other’s party identifications. The findings provide a greater understanding of how predictors facilitate or hinder the parent-to-child political socialization process. Specifically, politicization improves child perception, but has no role in the child’s motivation to adopt parental values. Conversely, closeness and parental value strength influence children to be like their parents, but has little effect on knowing their parents’ values. And higher education, a trait previously thought to have little role in parent-child transmission, leads to lower adoption of parental values.