Her Mother's Daughter? The Influence of Childhood Socialization on Women's Political Engagement

Abstract

This analysis draws on data from a survey of women in English-speaking Canada to examine whether early exposure to politics in the home can counteract the effects of female socialization. We examine the effect of parents' political activity on their adult daughters' interest in politics, political knowledge, and participation in both electoral (e.g., party membership and voting) and nonelectoral (e.g., demonstrations and political consumerism) forms of political action. We find that a politically active mother can have a role-model effect (net of other factors, such as education and age, that might affect a woman's level of political engagement) and that her influence outweighs that of a politically active father.

Keywords:

• political socialization
• political engagement
• political activity

Notes

1. The authors note the problem of biased recall and control for respondents’ political interest in an effort to mitigate its effects.

2. The response rate was 59 percent.

3. A case could be made for keeping political consumerism as a separate dimension of political engagement. However, boycotting has long been considered a form of protest politics and dropping the political consumerism items from the scale reduces the reliability.

4. The Governor-General is the Queen's representative in Canada. The role is largely ceremonial. The appointment to this position of a woman of color attracted a good deal of media coverage.

5. Union membership might be expected to have a similar effect, but it proved to be unrelated to all of our measures of political engagement and was therefore dropped from the models in the interest of parsimony.

6. With cross-sectional data, it is, of course, impossible to disentangle life-cycle and generational effects.

7. All respondents of non-European ancestry were coded as belonging to a visible minority.

8. We used the ICE method developed by Royston (2004, 2005) to impute the missing values, and employed the tools developed by John B. Carlin and his colleagues (2008) to analyze the multiply imputed data in Stata. 22.6 percent of cases had missing values on a single variable, 18.3 percent had missing values on two variables, and 3.5 percent had missing values on three variables.

9. When we use ordered logistic regression to estimate the models for electoral participation, extra-electoral political activity, political interest, and political knowledge, the results are similar. The only exception relates to the electoral participation model estimated in Table 2: the coefficient for having a politically active mother does not quite achieve conventional levels of statistical significance (p = .14). The results also hold when the party membership model is estimated using binary logistic regression. For ease of understanding, we have chosen to present the ordinary least squares results.

10. The Governor-General immigrated to Canada from Haiti as a child. Her name, Michaelle Jean, created problems for some English-speaking respondents. Accordingly, interviewers were asked to record mentions that came very close. We counted these answers as correct.

11. We have combined the two lowest education categories in order to have a sufficient number of cases on which to base inferences about the effects for women with less formal education.

12. We would like to thank the Journal's anonymous reviewer for his suggestion.