A Penchant for Parental Politics: How network diffusion explains children’s political beliefs
What’s the single most powerful predictor of a person’s political alignment? Perhaps it’s their race or socioeconomic status – those are things that people can strongly identify with. Or maybe it’s where they live – after all, we consistently have red or blue states. While those demographic categories can show a strong correlation to certain beliefs, they can’t compare to the influence that our parents’ political views can have in shaping our own. You certainly remember many of the likes and dislikes of your parents that they mentioned as you were growing up. Young children and teenagers are the most impressionable by their parents, and they inevitably latch onto any reference to politics spoken over the dinner table.
This can be very easily explained by the diffusion principle. As a child, your network of people that you know is relatively small – only your friends and family – and out of that network, you probably are only significantly influenced by your parents. Your parents’ views then get passed on as they “diffuse” through the network directly to you. For example, from the article, the Russon family as having liberal parents, which in turn produced staunchly liberal children. In opposition to that worldview, the Wilder family made sure that their children were devoutly conservative.
However, the article cites a study from the British Journal of Political Science showing that people have a strong tendency to switch sides once they leave home and progress into adulthood. Furthermore, this tendency is magnified especially when people attend college, which have been commonly denigrated by conservative sources as being outposts of “liberal indoctrination”. Returning to the diffusion principle, our networks grow exponentially once we graduate from high school; suddenly, we are faced with a seemingly endless number of new friends, acquaintances, professors, and coworkers, all of whom have the potential to influence us. As such, ideas are very quick to diffuse around college campuses, and it’s no surprise that people tend to switch political viewpoints as soon as they no longer live with their parents.