2024/04/05 by Turgut Keskintürk · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Social Policy and Reform Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.31235/osf.io/rk47w
Do life-course transitions in adulthood shape political orientations? One framework suggests that life events expose people to new information, allowing actors to assess their political beliefs in response to these social experiences. An alternative framework suggests that the link between one's life-course position and political beliefs may be ambiguous, and early experiences should be more informative for political orientations. In this article, I use 4 household surveys across 3 countries and 40 items on political beliefs and preferences to test whether life-course transitions change one's political orientations. In doing this, I employ difference-in-differences models to identify the effects of 6 life transitions across family and work domains on a wide variety of propositional survey items. I find that life-course transitions have no substantive influence on political orientations, and the general findings are not sensitive to differences in political interest or the age at which respondents go through these life events.