Parents, Peers, and Politics: The Long-term Effects of Vertical Social Ties

Abstract

We examine how one’s adult political participation is affected by having social ties to a politician during adolescence. Specifically, we estimate the long-term effect of having had a classmate during upper secondary school whose parent was running for office on future voter turnout and the likelihood of running for and winning political office. We use unique Swedish population-wide administrative data and find that students in school classes with a larger number of politically active parents are more politically active as adults, both in terms of voting and political candidacy. Our results suggest that the effect of vertical social ties is predominantly mediated ∗We thank seminar participants at Uppsala University, the Oslo Turnout Workshop (2017), Swepsa (2017), APSA (2018), and MPSA (2019) for their helpful and constructive comments. Earlier versions of this paper circulated under the titles “Do Political Acquintances Make You Politically Active?” and “The Effect of Having Peers Whose Parents Are Politicians.” This research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC), grant number 683214 CONPOL, and the Swedish Research Council (VR), grant number 2017-02472. ∗∗Although the QJPS is committed to making replication material available, this article makes use of sensitive data that cannot be publicly shared. The associated replication file contains the code needed for scholars with access to the data to fully replicate the reported result. Online Appendix available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00019057_app Supplementary Material available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00019057_supp MS submitted on 8 April 2019; final version received 28 November 2019 ISSN 1554-0626; DOI 10.1561/100.00019057 © 2020 L. Aggeborn, N. Lajevardi, K-O. Lindgren, P. Nyman and S. Oskarsson