In today’s American society the population is experiencing a polarization on political beliefs. To understand why this is happening one would have to study the origins of these beliefs. In most cases the obvious influencer of beliefs would be the parents. Knowing how these are developed unleashes the possibility to break the chain of polarization of the general people.
My first figure is a graph a person’s level of political engagement as a function of the distance between their partisan self-identification and that of their parents. This shows that the more closely aligned one’s politics are with those of their parents, the more politically engaged they tend to be.
My next figure presents the results of a linear regression model estimating the impact of the individual of political interest of one’s parents on their level of political engagement. The political interest of an individual’s mother is shown to be a significant factor shaping the child’s political engagement. I interpret this to mean that the amount of engagement of the mother will positively influence the child to take the same route and continue those activities his/her mother partook in. However, there are other varying factors that correlate more with the individual engagement, such as education level.