Political Socialization

Edward Greenberg, Edward Greenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351498630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Focusing on the forces underlying headlines, this volume examines the processes and outcomes of political socialization-the ways in which an individual acquires the attitudes, beliefs, and values of the political culture from the surrounding environment, and takes on a role as citizen within that political framework.Political Socialization vividly points out the contradiction currently existing between the optimism found in the traditional literature of this field and the reality of dramatic present-day incidents. This book offers a selection of papers that advance the recognized approach and set forth the new thinking on the subject. It provides a survey of both sides of this thought-provoking debate and, as such, remains as valid today as when it was first published in 1970.An incisive introduction by the editor defines and outlines the issues and problems involved, and places the various contributions in perspective. Greenberg voices the belief that "a significant number of the young and highly educated are beginning to bring into question the legitimacy of political, social, and economic arrangements" and that the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement were socializing events, playing as powerful a role as did the Depression for the parents of the younger generation. The debate format will provide the reader with a variety of commentary and lead them to form their own judgment on these major historical intellectual disputes.

I Homogeneous and
Supportive Outcomes

1 Assumptions about the
Learning of Political
Values

Roberta Sigel

Every society that wishes to maintain itself has as one of its functions the socialization of the young so that they will carry on willingly the values, traditions, norms, and duties of their society. The newborn child is not born socialized. Socialization is a learning process. Such learning, however, is not limited to the acquisition of the appropriate knowledge about a society’s norms but requires that the individual so makes these norms his own—internalizes them—that to him they appear to be right, just, and moral. Having once internalized the society’s norms, it will presumably not be difficult for the individual to act in congruence with them. A politically organized society had the same maintenance needs and consequently had an additional function: the political socialization of the young. Political socialization is the gradual learning of the norms, attitudes, and behavior accepted and practiced by the ongoing political system. For example, members of a stable democratic system are expected to learn to effect change through elections, through the application of group practice, rather than through street riots or revolutions.

“Viewed this way political socialization would encompass all political learning, formal and informal, deliberate and unplanned, at every stage of the life cycle, including not only explicitly political learning but also normally not political learning which affects political behavior, such as the learning of politically irrelevant social attitudes and the acquisition of political relevant personality characteristics.”¹

The goal of political socialization is to so train or develop individuals that they become well-functioning members of the political society. While the definition of a well-functioning members will vary with the political system—from obedient passive subject in one system to active participating citizen in another—a well-functioning citizen is one who accepts (internalizes) society’s political norms and who will then transmit them to future generations. For without a body politic so in harmony with the ongoing political values the political system would have trouble functioning smoothly and perpetuating itself safely. And survival, after all, is a prime goal of the political organism just as it is of the individual organism.

At no time in history has the importance of successful political socialization been demonstrated more dramatically than today. Old and new nations today are faced with the problem of rapid political change. This change has brought about disruption of old familial social patterns, ideological orientations, and economic conditions, to name but a few. Such change— like change in general—is always fraught with tension, discomfort, and disequilibrium. If it proceeds with a minimum of these, all is well for the political system. But the danger always exists that the tensions are more than the system can endure. Chances are that one of the factors which contribute to relatively tension free change—and hence to system stability—is the successful political socialization of its members. One of the many difficulties besetting the newly developed nations is precisely this one: how to quickly train or socialize young and old alike so that they will internalize the norms of the new nation and thus assure its survival. And even for the older, stabler nations this is an important task, for they are confronted with the problem of how to insure the loyalty and engagement of their members in the face of rapid political, technological, and social changes and in the presence of government ever growing in complexity, geographical distance, and general impersonality. To the extent, for example, that in a modern industrialized nation the citizen finds political decisions to have become increasingly complex, technical, and difficult to understand, the danger exists that the citizen will lose his touch with the political system, that he will become disengaged, apathetic, or even alienated. An apathetic citizen in times of crisis, even in times of hardship and political or economic setbacks, forms a very shaky foundation for any political system. The system cannot count on his active support or loyalty. An alienated citizen is an even greater threat to the system, since he can become its active foe. Tanks and bayonets can and do keep disloyal citizens subdued but they can at best maintain an uneasy peace. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that a nation’s stability and survival depends in large measure on the engagement of its members.

No wonder that both philosopher and practicing politican as long ago as Plato—and probably long before that—have devoted thought and effort to the question of how to bring about such engagement. Such practitioners and philosophers, however, did not call the training process political socialization; rather they called it civic education, lessons in patriotism, training for citizenship, or character-training. Every one of these terms indicates that political values and attitudes are acquired, not inborn—that they are the result of a learning process. The reason we today prefer to call this learning process political socialization rather than civic education is that the latter has to deliberate a connotation. It presumes that systemappropriate political values are acquired as a result of deliberate indoctrination, textbook learning, conscious and rational weighing of political alternatives, and the like. It seems to assume that there is a definite point in time—a certain grade in school—when such learning can profitably start and a certain point when it is completed. This view is far too naive and narrow; it completely ignores what we know about the way in which people go about “learning” society’s norms. For instance, it ignores the fact that much of this norm-intemalization goes on casually and imperceptibly—most of the time in fact without our ever being aware that it is going on. It proceeds so smoothly precisely because we are unaware of it. We take the norms for granted, and it does not occur to us to question them. What Cantril has to say about the learning of religious norms would probably apply with equal force to the learning of political norms.

The relative uniformity of a culture from one generation to another, the usual slow rate of change, is clear indication that many norms of the culture are uncritically accepted by a large majority of the people…. For the norms of society are by no means always merely neutral stimuli from which the individual may pick and choose as he pleases, which he may regard as good or bad, as right or wrong when the spirit moves him. Most of them have already been judged by society, by the individual’s predecessors, when he first experiences them. When people learn about a specific religion they generally learn at the same time that it is the “best” or that it is the “true” religion.²

Easton and Dennis graphically describe the uncritical way in which norms are accepted: “In many ways a child born into a system is like an immigrant into it. But where he differs is in the fact that he has never been socialized to any other kind of system…. He learns to like the government before he really knows what it is.”³ No doubt this is the reason why for young boys in an American summer camp a word like freedom was not a neutral stimulus but one evoking positive feelings while the word power brought mixed reactions.⁴ American society had prejudged for them and told them that freedom is a good thing. It had told them that when they had been much younger than they were then, when they had had no basis—or desire— to question the accuracy of such information.

And if such learning takes place at “every life cycle,” then obviously we cannot be content with studying adults only, but we must look at adolescents and even children to see what values and norms they acquire which may have a bearing on later adult political behavior….

Political socialization is a learning process which begins very early and is most influenced by the same agents or forces which influence all social behavior: first and foremost, the family; then socially relevant groups or institutions, such as school, church, and social class; and finally—last but not least— society at large and the political culture it fosters.

Because the consequences are political, political scientists recently have begun to ask questions such as: How and when is such learning acquired? Who most influences the young? What is the content of political socialization across cultures and subcultures? What are the consequences for political system of different socialization processes and contents? Probably the least researched of all these questions is the one concerning the acquisition of learning. Unfortunately, political socialization studies are not yet sufficiently plentiful—nor sufficiently learning-oriented—to chart for us a detailed, empirically derived map which illustrates just how the above agents and institutions go about “socializing” the young.

From The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, voi. 361, 1965, pp. 1–3.

References

1. Fred I. Greenstein, “Political Socialization,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Crowell-Collier Macmillan, 1968).

2. Hadley Cantril, The Psychology of Social Movements (New York: Wiley, 1963), p. 6.

3. David Easton and Jack Dennis, “The Child’s Image of Government,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 361 (1965), 56, 57.

4. These observations are drawn from lengthy, unstructured interviews conducted at a Young Men’s Christian Organization camp by Eugene B. Johnson and Roberta S. Sigel (Report to be published later).

2 The Child’s Image of
Government

David Easton
Jack Dennis

Political socialization refers to the way in which a society transmits political orientations—knowledge, attitudes or norms, and values—from generation to generation. Without such socialization across the generations, each new member of the system, whether a child newly born into it or an immigrant newly arrived, would have to seek an entirely fresh adjustment in the political sphere. But for the fact that each new generation is able to learn a body of political orientations from its predecessors, no given political system would be able to persist. Fundamentally, the theoretical significance of the study of socializing processes in political life resides in its contribution to our understanding of the way in which political systems are able to persist,¹ even as they change, for more than one generation.

The Theoretical Setting

A society transmits many political orientations across the generations, from the most trivial to the most profound. One of the major tasks of research is to formulate criteria by which we may distinguish the significant from the less important. Once we posit the relationship between socialization and system persistence, this compels us to recognize that among many theoretical issues thereby raised, a critical one pertains to the way in which a society manages or fails to arouse support for any political system, generation after generation. In part, it may, of course, rely on force or perception of self-interest. But no political system has been able to persist on these bases alone. In all cases, as children in society mature, they learn through a series of complicated processes to address themselves more or less favorably to the existence of some kind of political life.

But socialization of support for a political system is far too undifferentiated a concept for fruitful analysis. As has been shown elsewhere,² it is helpful to view the major objects toward which support might be directed, as the political community, the regime, and the authorities (or loosely, the government). The general assumption is that failure to arouse sufficient support for any one of these objects in a political system must lead to its complete extinction.

This paper seeks to illuminate one of the numerous ways in which the processes of socialization in a single political system, that of the United States, manages to generate support for limited aspects of two political objects: the regime and the government (authorities). Ultimately, comparable studies in other systems should enable us to generalize about the processes through which members learn to become attached to or disillusioned with all the basic objects of a system.

Within this broad theoretical context our specific problems for this paper can be simply stated: How does each generation born into the American political system come to accept (or reject) the authorities and regime? As the child matures from infancy, at what stage does he begin to acquire the political knowledge and attitudes related to this question? Do important changes take place even during childhood, a time when folklore has it that a person is innocent of things political? If so, can these changes be described in a systematic way?

Government as a Linkage Point

In turning to the political socialization of the child, we are confronted with a fortunate situation. The area that the theoretical considerations of a systems analysis dictate as central and prior—that of the bond between each generation of children and such political objects as the authorities and regime— happens to coincide with what research reveals as part of the very earliest experiences of the child. As it turns out empirically, children just do...