Chapter 8: Socialization into Politics: Parental Position-taking and Value Formation in Children Among Elite and Non-elite Groups

Political socialization has generally been understood as the direct transmission of political views from parents to their offspring. Acknowledging that the family is not an exclusive environment for shaping the politics of an individual, we maintain that, in Chile, parents are effective at handing down their political positions to their children. In order to reach this conclusion, we follow an innovative methodological strategy. First, instead of focusing our analysis on the outcome of political ideology, our dependent variables are values and school expectations. Second, rather than considering parents in isolation, we do so in connection to the school they have chosen for the purposes of instilling in their children a particular set of views. Third, our explanatory variables are conceived based on the process of political polarization that, it has been argued, has been underway in various countries in recent decades. Thus, in order to capture extreme positions, our models include the unacceptability of homosexuality, openness to authoritarian governments, and intensity of religious activity. Results are compared for elite and non-elite groups. Based on our results, we can conclude that parents’ political views have important effects on their inclinations regarding school expectations and value formation by their children. However, overlaps in views on important areas make it difficult to contend outright that political polarization is the hegemonic driver of Chilean politics today.