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Political socialisation: all lecture notes and summary of literature
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Political socialisation: all lecture notes and summary of literature
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Summary Political SocializationWeek 1.1: What is political socialization and why is it important?
Conceptual model of the course material:
We are interested in the political attitudes and behaviors (the outcomes). We study the micro level:
the individual characteristics (predispositions and everyday life experiences). And we study the
macro level, the context characteristics: the political, media and cultural context.
Questions for today:
- What is (political) socialization?
- Why should we study political socialization?
What is political socialization?
“political socialization is the study of how people become citizens”. In essence political socialization is
seen as the process where people become citizens. It is also about believes and how people relate to
the political world. People are socialized into the roles they are meant to fulfill. Functionalist
elementary
How did you become the citizen you are yourself? How come you have interest in politics, as we are
in a political program?
Group assignment: how did you become a citizen?
- Think about what experiences made you into a citizens and write these down
- Highschool: maatschappijleer
- At home: parents I just followed them
- University: talk about it more at school and with friends form own opinions
Both peers and teachers
- (Social) Media
What do you see a lot? What do people you follow share? filter bubble
- Starting to think about a career family situation had an influence
- Choice of newspaper
- Where you grow up, where you choose to live after that
- Micro, miso and macro features
Macro: country democratic country, economic stable country, chance to go to school and
in the basis everyone had the some opportunities (this is the goal).
Micro: teacher said to vote (direct)
Miso: family, friends, church
,How did you become a citizen?
- Political interest parents
- Education/teachers
- Personal characteristics
- Media/social media
- Salient political issues
- Politically active parents
- Voting preference parents (influence early on)
- Peers
- Political climate living area
- Country characteristics (democracy, economic stability)
- “Influencers” (teacher, politician)
- Church
- Local culture (feeling of community)
- Feeling included/excluded in society/marginalized position in society
Week 1.2
Why would you want to study socialization?
Political socialization keeps happening and has a big influence on different aspects of political study
area’s. Study political socialization in the post-truth era, in the covid-19 era, in different area’s of the
world (now it is mostly studied in the United States).
It helps to understand the system we are in and the shared norms we have. It helps us to understand
the boxes in which we think. It helps us understand the structures of society. The study of political
socialization offers a framework.
- What is political socialization? Try to formulate this in your own words.
The process of becoming a politically involved citizen. Where do you stand in the society as an
individual? Learning what system you are in and where you place yourself in this system. It is a
learning process which is mediated by different actors.
- What are macro-level and micro-level views on political socialization?
- Why should political scientists be interested in political socialization?
It can explain the origins of political interests. The preferences we have influence our behavior, it has
practical implementation in practical life.
- What is meant by ‘functionalist socialization’?
Socialization is “a particular part of learning” through which actors acquire “the requisite orientations
for satisfactory functioning in a role”. For Parsons, values themselves drive social action and social
continuity.
According to functionalists, the socialization process is coercive, forcing us to accept the values and
norms of society. The values and norms of society are agreed upon by all members of society
because there is a “social contract” in effect which protects us from one another and keeps society
stable and balanced.
- What critiques on functionalist socialization can you give?
Functionalist accounts of socialization came to be understood as cultural downloading, lacking
necessary attention to agency, incoherence, and conflict. Critics of Parsons’s theory of socialization
focused on his failure to account for power and agency, as well as his theory’s teleology and
,incoherence. Yet in addition to these analytical criticisms, there were political problems as well.
Strong theories of socialization could lead to “deficit thinking” and victim blaming in accounts of
racial and socioeconomic inequality
For Parsons, values themselves drive social action and social continuity; many of his critics were more
interested in the power that enforces such values, arguing that when structural congruity does exist,
it is because of power rather than besides or before it.
Other critiques of Parsons’s model emphasized the importance of conflict as constitutive not only of
the psyche but also of social life itself.
The critique of Parsons’s insufficient attention to agency is paralleled by a critique of insufficient
attention to heterogeneity.
Highlighting the role of culture (and its socialization) allows intellectuals, politicians, and activists to
deny—or at least obfuscate—other mechanisms that have maintained inequality, especially racism
and resource hoarding.
The critiques come together in a broader push to see individuals as agentic, active interpreters of
their social and cultural worlds, often through emphasizing the centrality of practices and
embodiment.
If you only use the functionalist socialization approach, you might miss out on the micro level.
- What gets lost without socialization?
Losing power: For scholars studying systems of race, gender, class, migration, and sexuality, as well
as those studying other powerful institutional identities, the term socialization usefully emphasizes
how these identities are developed and rendered powerful in ways beyond any one actor’s control.
Losing history: Without socialization, it is easy to lose sight of how people came to know the culture
they know. Culture is not simply there, it develops over time.
Losing transferability: Without socialization, it is also more difficult to see the parallels between
learning processes described in different academic disciplines. Even if those uses are not perfectly
consistent, having a shared terminology allows scholars from different subfields and disciplines to
recognize similarities in their work. Even though new terms can provide new insights, adding too
many new terms— rather than adapting old ones—can make the discipline’s theoretical core
unwieldly and, ironically, ungenerative.
Statements:
1. The functionalist perspective is vital for understanding processes of political socialization.
It can give a broader perspective.
A functionalist wouldn’t talk about bias and stereotypes, because those are needed for the system to
work. These are essential for the system, and they don’t critique them.
Functionalist perspective: you are born into a certain structure and then political socialization is just
downloading the norms and values of this structure. Argument: where is the agency here? Can’t
people develop in multiple ways? Inequality is seen as normal in the system, and is not
problematized.
, 2. Unconscious processes of socialization are more important than conscious processes of
socialization.
3. Populist attitudes are formed during childhood
Does not have to be this way, because you can be satisfied with the government for many years and
then something changes and you become critical. Events might have a big influence on the formation
of populists attitudes. There are some groups in society that are more likely to develop populist
attitudes and this is determined in your youth. So how you grow up can have a big influence on
whether you become a populist. Where you end up later can influence whether the populist feelings
come out or fade away. It is easier to go from being populist to remaining populist than from not
being populist at all to being populist.
1.1 Sapiro, V. (2004). NOT YOUR PARENTS'POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION: Introduction for a New
Generation. Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci., 7, 1-23.
Questions:
- What is political socialization? Try to formulate this in your own words.
- What are macro-level and micro-level views on political socialization?
- Why should political scientists be interested in political socialization?
By the end of the 1980s, the fall of one authoritarian regime after another raised new hopes for a
worldwide shift toward democracy. But, how do people who have learned to live in one system adapt
to and even help shape an entirely new one? When people’s long experience tells them to expect
only capriciousness or brutality from politics, under what circumstances and by what process can
they develop the fundamental trust in government and political process that is necessary for
democracy to flourish.
Shifts in global politics have created newly significant subnational and supranational political units
that change the nature of citizenship, in which people who have spent their careers as political
leaders of sovereign countries now act as collaborators in building common policies, identities, and
currency. In many countries, commentators worry about the decline in political engagement from
one generation to the next.
The field of political socialization offers scholarly frameworks to address all of these problems and
questions.
At the macro level, political socialization frames research on how polities and other political societies
and systems inculcate appropriate norms and practices in citizens, residents, or members.
Political socialization is a crucial mechanism for creating a political culture that could allow
democratic institutions and practices to function or an appropriate support function on the input side
of the political system.
At the micro level, political socialization frames research on the patterns and processes by which
individuals engage in political development and learning, constructing their particular relationships to
the political contexts in which they live.
The micro level view and the macro level view on political socialization are complementary, but they
tend to frame research questions and methods in somewhat different ways.
Hyman defined political socialization as an individual’s “learning of social patterns corresponding to
his societal positions as mediated through various agencies of society.”
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