Rethinking Youth Political Socialization

The relations between macro and micro democratic political socialization agents and youth civic participation were examined to foster understanding of the changing conceptualization of youth political socialization in modern society. Extant research on youth political socialization has failed to adequately examine the effects of broader political contexts in tandem with the effects of the broader democratic schooling processes, and thus presented a limited understanding of the relationship between the broader political context and youth political socialization. Youth civic participation was examined across 21 participant-countries of the cross-sectional survey, International Civics and Citizenship Study (ICCS) 2016 using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the traditional political socialization framework that attracts more attention to the significance of the broader political context regarding its relationship to youth civic engagement. This study extends previous research by simultaneously focusing on the political socialization agents of the broader political context as well as the broader democratic schooling processes from a macro-lens while controlling for other relevant distal and proximal institutions of socialization such as, at the individual-level, adolescents' political interest, gender, age, immigration status, and number of books at home; parents' level of political interest, and education; at the school-level, urbanicity, socioeconomic status and size of the school, and lastly, at the nation-level, the GDP Per Capita (US dollar) and their relationship to youth civic engagement, measured by the participation behavior of youth in and out of schools (as opposed to or instead of civic attitudes, knowledge or skills). The results of the HLM analysis indicate that the broader political contexts, as measured by the democracy level of each country, are not significantly related to youth civic participation in and out of school when democratic schooling processes and the relevant nation-level control variable are considered in the full models. This suggests that the broader political contexts may not be as effective in the political socialization of the young person. Another key finding is regarding the significant relationships between democratic schooling processes and youth civic participation in and out of school. The results show that throughout all the models, almost all the school-level variables representing democratic schooling processes are significantly related to youth civic participation in and out of school, even after adding the main nation-level variable of interest, the democracy level, and the nation-level control variable, GDP per capita. The non-significant relation between the broader political environment and youth civic participation in and out of school and the significant relation between the broader democratic schooling processes and youth civic participation in and out of school do not reflect the traditional view of youth political socialization. In fact, these findings suggest that the traditional political socialization framework may not function in a schooled society.