Accounting for the association between socioeconomic status and youth political participation: A twin family study

Abstract

Political participation (PP) has been found to be associated with socioeconomic status (SES) indicators, most strongly with educational attainment. At the same time, previous research has been inconclusive regarding potentially biasing effects of personality and cognitive characteristics on this association. In the present study, we investigated the association between different forms of youth PP and attained SES, taking youth's and parents' individual characteristics into account. We used data from 983 German twin families with same‐sex twin pairs of emerging adults (aged 21–25) that provided information on electoral, nonelectoral individual and collective political participation as well as on youth's and their parents relevant personality and cognitive characteristics. After adjusting for youth's and parents' individual characteristics, regression analyses showed educational attainment and household income to be solely significantly associated with emerging adults' electoral political participation. Genetically informative analyses revealed confoundedness due to shared environmental factors for electoral PP and due to genetic factors for individual and collective PP. Depending on the form of PP, the covariance between attained SES indicators and youth's PP mostly or fully overlapped with variance in political interest, general cognitive ability, and/or openness to experience. Findings are discussed against the backdrop of genotype‐environment interplay.