Intergenerational Correlations of Extreme Right‐Wing Party Preferences and Attitudes toward Immigration

• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017
• Author: Thomas Siedler,Alexandra Avdeenko
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/sjoe.12190

Scand. J. of Economics 119(3), 768–800, 2017

DOI: 10.1111/sjoe.12190

Intergenerational Correlations of Extreme

Right-Wing Party Preferences and

Attitudes toward Immigration∗

Alexandra Avdeenko

University of Mannheim, DE-68131 Mannheim, Germany

avdeenko@uni-mannheim.de

Thomas Siedler

University of Hamburg, DE-20146 Hamburg, Germany

thomas.siedler@wiso.uni-hamburg.de

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the importance of parental socialization on the development of

children’s far right-wing preferences and attitudes toward immigration. Using longitudinal

data from Germany, our intergenerational estimates suggest that the strongest and most

important predictor for young people’s right-wing extremism are their parents’ right-wing

extremist attitudes. While intergenerational associations in attitudes toward immigration are

equally high for sons and daughters, we find a positive intergenerational transmission of

right-wing extremist party affinity for sons, but not for daughters. Compared to the inter-

generational correlation of other party affinities, the high association between fathers’ and

sons’ right-wing extremist attitudes is particularly striking.

Keywords: Extremism; gender differences; intergenerational links; longitudinal data; political

preferences

JEL classification:C23; D72; J62; P16

I. Introduction

[The child] shall be brought up in a spirit of understanding, tolerance, friend-

ship among peoples, peace and universal brotherhood, respect for freedom

of religion or belief of others. (United Nations, 1981).

A number of international declarations and politicians have emphasized

the family as the place where promoting tolerance and shaping attitudes of

openness should take place (i.e., United Nations, 1981; UNESCO, 1995).

∗We thank Sandra Black, Dan Hamermesh, Ronny Freier, Martin Kroh, Andrew J. Oswald,

Christian Pfarr, Daniel Schnitzlein, and Markus Tepe for helpful comments. We gratefully

acknowledge funding from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Research Foundation

(SFB 884), and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (award no. RES-518-

28-001).

CThe editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2016.

A. Avdeenko and T. Siedler 769

For example, in a public memorial ceremony for the victims of right-wing

terrorism, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that the origins of

disrespectful thought and behavior are closely related to upbringing. She

argued that the family is the place where civil society grows and where

children learn the basics of responsible coexistence.1

In the economic literature on the origins of preference formation, parental

intentional strategies have been examined, and their potential long-term so-

cial impact has been modeled (Bisin and Verdier, 2000, 2001; Epstein,

2007; Guiso et al., 2008; Tabellini, 2008; Adriani and Sonderegger, 2009).

In this theoretical literature on cultural transmission, parents actively or

passively instill their attitudes and preferences into their children, resulting

in similarities across generations. Indeed, political scientists find high cor-

relations of the nature and extent of political preferences between parents

and children. The first empirical study to report a positive intergenerational

relationship in political preferences was Jennings and Niemi (1968), whose

results were later supported by supplementary study designs and method-

ological approaches (Alford et al., 2005; Hatemi et al., 2009; Jennings

et al., 2009). However, the origins of attitudes toward immigration and

preferences for far right-wing parties have not yet been studied.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to empirically ex-

amine the transmission of nationalistic preferences and attitudes toward

immigration from one generation to the next, based on rich longitudinal

data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1990–

2009. The SOEP allows us to match parents to adult children, and it is

therefore ideally suited to the study at hand. We focus on two related out-

comes: extreme party preferences (i.e., preferences for far right-wing par-

ties) and attitudes toward immigration.2We consider socio-economic and

labor market characteristics that might be correlated with children’s prefer-

ences, such as parents’ and adult children’s education, income, the regional

strength of right-wing parties, and federal state fixed effects. To minimize

the possibility that adult children might influence their parents’ party iden-

tification and attitudes toward immigration, we examine whether parents

ever reported leaning toward far right-wing parties during their offspring’s

childhood years, and we measure the relationship with the children’s polit-

ical preferences later in life. Moreover, we compare the intergenerational

association in right-wing party affinity to intergenerational estimates for

five major parties in Germany.

1See https://www.bundeskanzlerin.de/ContentArchiv/EN/Archiv17/Reden/2012/2012-02-23-

bkin-central-memorial-ceremony-to-commorate-the-victims-of-extreme-reight-wing-violence.

html.

2Several empirical studies point to an important relationship between individuals’ anti-foreign

sentiments and their affinity toward far right-wing parties (Lubbers et al., 2002; Arzheimer,

2008, 2009; Pardos-Prado, 2011).

CThe editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2016.

770 Intergenerational correlations of right-wing extremism

The results of this study point to a strong intergenerational association

in far right-wing attitudes between sons and parents. Having parents who

express right-wing extremist attitudes during childhood increases an adult

son’s propensity to express affinity toward a far right-wing party as a

young adult by around 13 percentage points. This is a large effect, given

that around 6 percent of adult sons report an affinity toward a far right-wing

party at some point in time. In contrast, the intergenerational association

in right-wing party affinity between parents and daughters is very close to

zero.

As a benchmark, we present the intergenerational correlation of political

affinities for other major political parties in Germany. The results point to

a puzzling social phenomenon that distinguishes far right-wing party iden-

tifications from those with other parties. While we find striking differences

in the intergenerational transmission of right-wing party affinity between

daughters and sons, there are no comparable large gender differences in

the intergenerational association of affinity for other parties.

The findings of the intergenerational association in far right-wing prefer-

ences are mainly confirmed by an alternative outcome variable of attitudes

toward immigration. Young adults whose parents were very concerned about

immigration to Germany during their childhood years have a 27 percent-

age point (60 percent) higher likelihood of also expressing strong concerns

about immigration as young adults. However, no significant gender differ-

ences are found.

Potential problems with answers to survey questions – in particular, with

questions on extreme party affinity – are that individuals do not reveal

their true preferences. Therefore, we compare individual measures of far

right-wing party preferences and attitudes toward immigration with official

voting results for far right-wing parties at general elections in Germany.

We find a positive and statistically significant correlation between the sub-

jective and objective measures at the state level. The positive correlation

makes us quite confident about the behavioral validity of the survey mea-

sures used. Nevertheless, we should point out that the study estimates

and reports intergenerational associations rather than causal effects. In line

with most studies on intergenerational transmissions, the disentanglement

of nurture and nature remains a challenge.

The outline of the paper is as follows. In Section II, we present a short

discussion of the development of new theoretical models explaining the in-

tergenerational transmission of preferences and the related empirical litera-

ture. In Section III, we describe the data and present summary statistics. In

Section IV, we discuss the empirical models. In Section V, we document

the intergenerational correlation estimates in right-wing extremist prefer-

ences and attitudes toward immigration. In Section VI, we present several

robustness checks and discuss caveats, and we conclude in the final section.

CThe editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2016.