Growing into politics under material hardship: The impact of socio-economic problems on political socialization

大量文献认识到政治参与具有很强的社会经济梯度。穷人的投票率和参与政治的其他形式往往较低。虽然这导致他们在政治进程中的发言权不平等，但我们仍然对导致低收入公民政治冷漠的确切机制知之甚少。拟议的项目将通过从生命历程的角度研究社会经济问题与政治参与之间的联系来解决这一差距。指导问题是，这两个变量之间的联系在多大程度上应该被视为直接的因果关系；或者富人和穷人在政治参与方面的主要差异是因为他们在青年和童年时期有不同的社会化经历。从理论上讲，该项目建立在先前研究的两个核心发现之上。首先，根据“易受影响的年代”假说，政治行为和取向在成年早期之前是相对可塑的，之后会变得越来越有弹性。因此，社会经济问题可能会影响年轻时的政治参与，但在壮年时期的习惯过程中失去解释力。第二，事实证明，父母通过政治学习和地位传递来影响子女，这在投票年龄之前就造成了参与性不平等。因此，在横断面数据中通常观察到的社会经济梯度在很大程度上可归因于家庭背景和童年经历。在实证上，本项目采用了大规模的面板调查数据。特别是，它包括了对很小的孩子（从9岁开始）进行调查的研究。这些很少使用的样本使我们能够调查人们生活中的一个时期，在这个时期，社会经济经历可能为他们进入政界奠定（或损害）重要的基础。在方法上，我们采用潜在增长曲线模型来研究政治参与在生命历程中的发展，采用差分匹配技术来确定个人生活经历对政治参与的因果关系，采用序列分析来发现社会经济问题和政治参与的轨迹。

A large literature recognizes a strong socio-economic gradient in political involvement. Voting turnout and other forms of engaging with politics tend to be lower among the poor. While this results in an unequal representation of their voices in the political process, we still know little about the precise mechanism that contribute to political apathy among citizens with low income. The proposed project will address this gap by studying the link between socio-economic problems and political involvement in a life-course perspective. The guiding question is to what extent the link between both variables should be thought of as a direct, causal one; or whether rich and poor primarily differ in their political involvement because they make different socialization experiences in their youth and childhood. Theoretically, the project builds on two core findings in previous research. First, according to the “impressionable years” hypothesis, political behaviours and orientations are comparatively malleable until early adulthood and become increasingly resilient afterwards. Socio-economic problems could thus affect political involvement at young age, but lose explanatory power during the process of habituation in prime age. Secondly, parents have been shown to influence their children through political learning and through status transmission, which contributes to participatory inequality already before voting age. The socio-economic gradient typically observed in cross-sectional data could thus be largely attributable to family background and childhood experiences.Empirically, the project makes use of large-scale panel survey data. In particular, it includes studies which survey children already at a very young age (starting at age 9). Such rarely used samples allow us to investigate a period in people’s lives where socio-economic experiences might lay (or impair) crucial foundations for growing into politics. Methodologically, we employ latent growth curve modeling to study the development of political involvement over the life-course, difference-in-difference matching techniques to identify the causal effect of individual life-experiences on political involvement, and sequence analysis to discover trajectories of socio-economic problems and political involvement.