In debates on lowering the legal voting age from 18 to 16, one of the main arguments is that 16-year olds are too young and politically inexperienced to cast a clear motivated and meaningful vote. On the other hand, socialization research has regularly shown that ideological attitudes are already formed at an early stage in life, and tend to be quite stable over the life-course. Assuming that 15-year-old adolescents have developed basic ideological preferences, we examine how these preferences can already play a role in the formation of their voting intentions. Since research has shown that parties with a clear-cut profile tend to be more successful among young voters, we hypothesize that especially for these parties, ideological preferences will play a role in the formation of adolescent voting intentions.
Next to the role of ideological preferences, we examine the role of parents in the adolescent’s formation of voting intentions. Especially in the early stage of the development of voting intentions, parents are found to be one of the most important socialization agents. Using structural equation modeling, we compare the effects of ideological preferences and parental voting intentions on the development of adolescent vote choice, with additional attention for the moderating effects of the adolescent’s level of political interest and education in this formation process. In other words: to what extent do adolescents rely on the cues of their parents and under which circumstances are they ideologically capable of making their own, substantiated choice?
We use data from the Parent-Child Socialization Study (2012-2013), a two-wave panel study conducted among 3,426 adolescents and both their parents in Belgium. In this survey, we have measured adolescent and parental attitudes on a number of relevant ideological attitudes, such as ethnocentrism, environmentalism, authoritarianism and ethical conservatism as well as both parents and children’s party preferences.
