Research

What happens to the political preferences of adolescents when a parent becomes unemployed? A large literature examines how personal income and employment shocks shape adults’ support for redistribution, while a separate strand studies the lasting impact of economic conditions experienced during the formative years, when political preferences are first formed. Yet we know little about the consequences of vicarious experiences of economic shocks at this life. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2008) and the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (2009-present), this paper studies the effect of parental unemployment on the left-right political preferences of co-resident adolescent children. The argrument advanced is that adverse economic shocks can affect political preferences through two pathways – material self-interest and political socialisation – and that an unemployment shock within the household raises the salience of the former among adolescents. When the shock is experienced during the formative years, it can have lasting consequences throughout adulthood. Combining random forest proximity matching with matched difference-in-differences and event study designs, I find that treated adolescents adopt more left-wing political preferences. However, these results do not reach statistical significance at conventional levels.

This paper proposes a model of pre-adult political socialization within the family based on social learning theory. The proposed model is tested on data from the British Household Panel Study (1991-2008) and the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (2009-present). The empirical analyses provide support for a communication mechanism through which parents influence the party identification of their adolescent children. Contrary to the central claim of social learning theory, no evidence is found in support of the contact mechanism through which children are expected to learn by observing their parents. Rival explanations of political attitude formation that draw on political economy and behavioural genetics are addressed and ruled out empirically. Taken together, these results suggest that political socialisation remains a strong candidate to explain the formation of political attitudes, but social learning theory may not be suitable to explain how this occurs.

This paper identifies the causal impact of Partygate on support for the British Conservative Party through an Unexpected Event during Survey Design. As news of the scandals broke out among the British public in November 2021, collection of Wave 21 of the British Election Study Internet Panel was under way. This created a natural experiment where some respondents completed the survey “before” Partygate while others completed the survey “after”, thus being as-if randomly assigned to a control and treatment group. Results based on a differnece-inp-differences estimator show that that Partygate caused an immediate decline in likeability, support for, and identification with with the Conservative Party. The results are robust to alternative estimation approaches, including regression discontinuity in time.

With Francesco Fioritto