Political Socialization: Growing Up in a Non-intact Family and Civic Disengagement

Abstract

Over the last several decades, a large number of developed countries has not only witnessed a downturn in civic engagement, but has also seen the breakdown of traditional family structures. Despite these coinciding trends, Putnam argues in Bowling alone (2000) that none of the major observed declines in civic engagement can be accounted for by the decline in the traditional family. In this paper, we seek to contribute a robust picture of how adult civic engagement is affected by growing up in a non-intact family. To this end, we use longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to construct various measures of family structure during childhood, and perform both cross-sectional and sibling-difference analyses for different indicators of young adults' civic engagement. Both exercises reveal a significant negative relationship between growing up in a non-intact family and children's civic, social and political engagement as adults. We argue that this finding is consistent with causation, rather than selection, being the explanation for the negative relationship, and provide a several robustness checks to support this claim.