Predicting adolescents’ party preferences: A study on the influence of issue attitudes and parental political views among adolescents in the Netherlands

The importance of adolescence for the development of political preferences and later electoral behavior has been recognized and demonstrated by various scholars in the past. Still, within this large body of research on adolescent political development, a paucity of research on the determinants of adolescents’ party preferences remains. In the current paper, we address this gap by studying adolescents’ attitudes towards sociopolitical issues as predictors of their party preferences. Moreover, we investigate which role parents play in this process, i.e. how parental issue attitudes and party preferences relate to those of adolescents. To do so, we utilize survey data of Dutch adolescents (15-19 years old) and their parents (N = 751 adolescent-parent pairs). We find that adolescents’ issue attitudes towards six different socio-political domains (immigration, government intervention, euthanasia, environmental protection, European integration, and redistribution of income) significantly predict their self-reported voting propensities for different parties. Moreover, we find two paths through which parents exert influence on the party preferences of their adolescent children. On one of these paths, adolescent issue attitudes function as a mediator between parental issue attitudes and adolescent party preferences. On the second path, parental party preferences function as the mediator. Lastly, we find a smaller but robust effect of adolescents’ issue attitudes on parental party preferences. Contrary to our expectations, we find no (generational) differences in the issue domains that drive adolescents and their parents to prefer one party over the other. Possible moderators of the examined effects are discussed.