Abstract
Where do individuals learn civic engagement? While voluntary associations are often seen as the breeding grounds for democratic skills and virtues, many preferences are learned by children in their family and thus passed on between generations. The present paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991–2008) for the UK to analyze the intergenerational transmission of civic engagement and political participation preferences. It finds that both voluntary associational count variables as well as frequency and strength measures of doing volunteer work and political party support are correlated between parents and their grown up children (i.e. after leaving the parental household), even when controlling for resources like socio-economic background. The intergenerational transmission is more pronounced with regard to triggering filial civic engagement, but frequency of parental engagement is less strongly transmitted. A robustness analysis suggests that peer influences (as measured by regional levels of civic engagement) do not drive the intergenerational transmission of civic engagement.
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Source: BHPS, waves 1–18 (1991–2008)
Source: BHPS, waves 1–18 (1991–2008)
Source: BHPS
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Notes
This is mirrored in research on charitable giving, where intergenerational elasticities vary between secular and religious giving (Wilhelm et al. 2008).
While one of the studies closest related to this one uses panel data (Volland 2013), it is interested in time use transmission in general and hence estimates the transmission of volunteering model omitting important controls such as religion and personality traits, potentially confounding transmission channels.
While initially at the forefront, the question of nature vs. nurture has recently become less important in analyses on such transmission, with researchers focussing more directly on specific parental attributes and their transmission to the offspring generation (Black and Devereux 2011, p. 1507).
While the count variables exhibit a large number of zeros, the absence of overdispersion suggests that poisson models are the appropriate modeling choice.
The survey is undertaken by the ESRC UK Longitudinal Studies Centre with the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, UK (BHPS 2010). Its aim is to track social and economic change in a representative sample of the British population (see Taylor 2010). Starting in 1991, up to now, there have been 18 waves of data collected with the aim of tracking the individuals of the first wave over time (in general, attrition is quite low, see Taylor 2010).
Running the models with dummies for greater UK regions yields similar results.
Averaging is unproblematic for continuous variables such as hours worked or income and is bound to reduce measurement error in variables and improve statistical inference. For originally ordinal-scaled dependent variables such as volunteering frequency, I round the averages to be able to use the original measurement scale. For education level, I do not use averages but the highest value, i.e. children eventually having tertiary education will be listed under that category. Averages of dummy variables essentially are percentages, where the variable is 1 if all time observed is spent in the respective condition, or less if only some years are spent in that condition (if a respondent is observed over five years, four out of which in unemployment, the average unemployment variable will be 0.8 = 4/5).
Variance inflation factors computed for all (OLS versions of the) main models to be presented later also confirm this, with the highest VIFs in the area of below 7 and mean VIFs for all models slightly below a value of 2. The highest individual VIFs are between the income variable and the income not reported dummy variable.
These elasticities are not constant over the range of the respective parental variables and are increasing in the independent variables but at a decreasing rate. The strongest non-linearity is present for activity, membership and political support, something left to explore in future work.
I have also run models including parental personality traits, but these have decreased sample size by a further 100 observations. Results are largely similar in those models, and parental personality traits did not predict filial preferences in a systematic way.
In essence, this can be called “identification through non-linear functional form” (Cameron and Trivedi 2010, p. 558).
Identification tests show that while overidentification tests (Hansen J null hypothesis cannot be rejected) and underidentification tests (Kleibergen-Paap LM rk null hypothesis can be rejected) are as desired, weak instrument tests indicate with their low F statistics that the instruments presented are suffering from weakness. Full test results available from the author on request.
I am indebted to an anonymous referee for raising this particular issue.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. I also wish to thank Ben Volland for helpful discussions. I am grateful for having been granted access to the BHPS data set, which was made available through the ESRC Data Archive. The data were originally collected by the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at the University of Essex (now incorporated within the Institute for Social and Economic Research). Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Archive bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. Remaining errors are mine.
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Appendix
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Binder, M. (Home-)Schools of Democracy? On the Intergenerational Transmission of Civic Engagement. Soc Indic Res 149, 911–945 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02278-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02278-y