Political socialization and

social movements
OLIVIER FILLIEULE

Political socialization (PS) has been defined in

various ways in the literature. Among the most
frequently encountered definitions is the one
that equates PS with mere learning, that is, the
state of a persons political knowledge and comprehension. Other definitions focus less on an
individuals knowledge inventory than on the
developmental sequence by which such knowledge and comprehension are acquired, whereas
others focus on the continuity over time of such
knowledge and attitudes. However, PS is more
and more defined as the gradual development
of the individuals own particular and idiosyncratic views of the political world, the process
by which a given societys norms and behavior
are internalized. This has three main theoretical
consequences: primary and secondary socializations are equally important in the socializing
process; it follows that not only family and
school are central instances of socialization
but also many other institutions active in the
life spheres of work, affective ties, voluntary
work and political engagements; and the political dimension is in play in all socialization
processes and doesnt correspond to a specific
domain of activity or designated institutions.
If research on PS decreased dramatically during the 1980s, declining civic participation and
social capital has helped the renewal of the
field. Prompted by such trends, one can note
a resurgence of scholarly inquiries not only
in the specific field of socialization but also
in various subfields including public opinion,
electoral behavior, and political culture. However, scant attention has been paid to social
movements. There are many reasons for this.
As Sapiro (1989) states:
social movements are populated by adults, and
only recently have socialization scholars turned

their attention in any serious way to adult socialization. Moreover . . . , political behavior or participation in political organizations is generally
conceived of as a dependent rather than independent variable. Socialization research has been
aimed at understanding why individuals do or
dont participate in politics, not at revealing the
effects of political activity. We have rarely studied the socialization effects of explicitly political
organizations as compared with others such as
families or schools.

(See also Whalen & Flacks 1989; Sigel 1995.)

We start with a synthetic description of the
four distinctive models that have been most
common in the field of PS. We then show how
individuals can be politically oriented by their
socialization towards protest behavior and in
turn durably affected by their participation in
social movements. This will bring us to discuss
methodological questions and propose some
directions for future research.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A RESEARCH
FIELD
Four basic ideas about the ways political dispositions might vary with age or life stages have
been most common in the literature.
The persistence model suggests that the
residues of preadult learning persist through
life, perhaps even hardening with time.
This asserts a simple main effect of age,
with dispositions acquired primarily in the
preadult years (Hess & Torney 1967). This
idea of lasting effects of early experiences was
derived from psychoanalytic and learning
theories and largely assumed rather than
tested directly. The difficulty stems from the
fact that any correlation of age with political
attitudes potentially reflects three different
confounded effects: cohort (birth cohort),
life cycle (age at measurement), and period
(year of measurement). That is why the
persistence viewpoint faced strong critical

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements,

Edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam.
2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbespm199

p o litical s o cialization and s o cial m ovements

reviews in the 1970s and 1980s (Searing,

Schwartz, & Lind 1973), suggesting that the
primacy principle had been overstated and
that, at best, the evidence for it, such as adult
retrospective accounts of their own attitudes or
longitudinal studies, had been quite indirect.
Long-term longitudinal studies appeared,
implying that partisan tendencies change more
after the preadult years than the persistent
view would allow (Jennings & Niemi 1981).
Strongly nourished by the rising influence
of rational choice theories, revisionism went
as far as stating that perhaps people were
constantly revising their thinking, in some
quite reality-based, data-oriented manner.
Some researchers then called for recognition of more openness to change through the
life course than the persistence theory allowed,
for example that Change during adulthood
is normal. The life course should be understood as a more integrated and contingent
whole (Sapiro 1994: 204) and that learning and development are not completed by
adulthood. Rather, they constitute a life long
process (Sigel 1989: viii). This gave way to
the lifelong openness model, which suggests that
dispositions have an approximately uniform
potential for change at all ages and that age
is irrelevant for attitude change. Unfortunately
this model has been largely unexplored. The
first volume on adult socialization appeared
only at the end of the 1980s (Sigel 1989). This
important series of studies examines the political effects of discontinuities within adulthood,
such as entering the workplace, serving in the
military, immigrating to a new country, participating in a social movement, getting married, or
becoming a parent. Each of these cases incorporates three elements that potentially can affect
political attitudes: crystallization of an individuals own unique identity, assumption of
new roles, and dealing with the unanticipated
demands of adulthood. This line of research
has been particularly convincing in stressing
the fact that neither childhood nor adolescence adequately prepare mature adults for
all the contingencies with which they have to
cope over their lifetimes. Hence the necessity

to adopt a lifespan perspective that takes into

account the impact that individual-level events
as well as macro-level ones have on the maintenance, modification, or abandonment of values
and orientations to which the individual may
have subscribed at an earlier point in his or
her life. However, the authors agree upon the
fact that all these specific discontinuities also
occur most often in late adolescence and early
adulthood, which means that the model here is
quite close to a third view, the impressionable
years model.
This model suggests that dispositions and
attitudes are particularly susceptible to influence in late adolescence and early adulthood
but tend to persist thereafter. A special instance
of the impressionable years hypothesis is the
generational effect (Mannheim 1952). This
occurs when a sizable number of those in the
supposedly impressionable life stage (late adolescence and early adulthood) are subjected to
a common massive pressure to change on some
particular issue. Three propositions are behind
this model: youth experience political life as a
fresh encounter, in Mannheims words, that
can be seldom replicated later; dispositions and
attitudes that are subjected to strong information flows and regularly practiced should
become stronger with age; and the young may
be especially open to influence because they
are becoming more aware of the social and
political world around them just at the life
stage when they are seeking a sense of self and
identity. Some important surveys support the
formative years hypothesis, for example, Jennings (2002) research about the durability of
protesters as a generational unit. As well, there
is other research which suggests that American
cohorts coming of age in the 1960s constitute a
distinctive political generation.
Finally, there is the life-cycle model, which
argues that people are attracted to certain attitudes at specific life stages, such as radical ideas
in their youth and conservatism in old age
(Jennings & Niemi 1981). This model is captured by the French saying: He who is not
a radical at 20 has no heart; he who is at 40
has no head. Cohort analysis has been the

p o litical s o cialization and s o cial m ovements

primary analytic technique used to test the lifecycle hypothesis and has revealed no significant
diminution with age in the number of self professed Left-oriented people nor any correlation
between conservatism and aging.
To summarize, the contemporary resurrection of socialization research points to the now
widely shared idea that dispositions, attitudes,
and behavior change throughout life, especially
during the formative years (i.e., between 15
and 25), and that some, possibly much, early
learning is of limited consequence for adult
political behavior. As a consequence, participation in social movements not only depends
on PS, but also has to be considered as having potentially socializing effects, which means
that social movement organizations and protest
events have to be studied as explicit and implicit
socializing agents.
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, DISPOSITIONS,
AND SOCIALIZATION PROCESS
Explicit and implicit PS through parental influence, school, and other varied institutions,
such as churches and youth organizations, are
considered as being among the main factors
explaining involvement in social movements,
but the systematic influence in early years of
PS is too often overstated. Sharing the same
set of dispositions with other members of an
activist group is still not enough to explain
commitment. In most cases, the mediation of
significant others (i.e., relatives, friends, colleagues, or even mentors such as teachers or
priests) is necessary though not sufficient. For
example, social psychologist Molly Andrews
(1991), who collected and analyzed the lifelong commitment of British socialist activists
from the 1930s to the 1980s, identified three
major factors of political involvement: intellectual stimuli, the role of political movements,
and tutelary figures. In this case, class position,
family influence, and formal education hardly
counted in fostering commitment. It was first
through the direct experience of labor conflicts
or political meetings and the influence of trade

union political work that they progressively

came to join the party. Most of the time it was a
neighbor, schoolmate, or older friend from the
occupational life-sphere who played the role of
initiator.
This stresses the fact that joining cannot be
understood as the result of a linear form of
socialization, with cumulative and mechanical
effects that can be visualized. Just as sociologists of deviant behavior have overcome the
deterministic explanations of deviance, sociologists of commitment have turned towards the
analysis of activist careers, drawing directly
on the symbolic interactionism toolkit. Applied
to political commitment, the notion of career
helps to understand how, at each biographical
stage, the attitudes and behaviors of activists
are determined by past attitudes and behaviors,
which in turn condition the range of future possibilities, thus resituating commitment across
the entire life cycle (Fillieule 2010).
However, the almost exclusive analytic concern with the institutional consequences of
protest and the subsequent neglect of its independent psychological effects is certainly one of
the major blind spots of contemporary social
movement research. One of the most promising directions for future research would be
to evaluate the degree to which a social movement transforms individual patterns of political
thinking and behavior and outline the ways in
which it does so. To date, three main empirical
domains have been explored, paving the way
for future research.
First, research on 1960s American activists
has addressed the question of the biographical
consequences of social movement participation
on the life-course, based on a series of followup studies of former movement participants,
suggesting that activism has a strong effect
both on political attitudes and behaviors as
well as on the personal lives of the subjects, like
occupational orientations and marital status
(Marwell, Aiken, & Demerath 1987; McAdam
1989; Whalen & Flacks 1989). However, in
addition to having a narrow focus on New Left
highly committed activists of the 1960s, these
studies are less interested in the very process

p o litical s o cialization and s o cial m ovements

by which movements act as socializing agents

than by its long term effects, as measured by
statistical indicators (see McAdam 1989 and
Whalen & Flacks 1989 for exceptions).
A second direction of research deals with
the study of black student activism in the
civil rights and black power movements and
of riot participants (Gurin & Epps 1975; Sears
& McConahay 1973). It explores environmental influences as well as the impact of activism
on political ideology and adult resocialization,
suggesting, among other interesting results,
that the riots themselves appeared to have generated a type of riot ideology that further
resocialized not only the direct participants but
those who only vicariously experienced them; a
result that has recently been confirmed by studies on not-so-committed participants (Sherkat
& Blocker 1997; Wilhelm 1998). But the value
of this research lies primarily in analyzing how
movements accomplish their socializing role,
teaching young blacks to question the overall
white system of domination through specific
organizational mechanisms like mass meetings,
workshops, and citizen and freedom schools.
A third research focus stems from feminist research and examines the development of
a gender consciousness through the womens
movement (Whittier 1995). The reason that
this movement has served as an active agent of
socialization is partly because one of its central
goals is to change womens self-understanding:
that is, to provide a social space in which women
can consider and negotiate their social identity
as women and its relationship to politics. The
most well-known strategy for such development is the consciousness-raising group, which
has spread around the world. Also important
in relation to consciousness raising has been
the call for separatism, demonstrations, and
symbolic political acts like Freedom Trashcans or Take Back the Night events.
Beyond the specific case of the womens
movement, feminist research suggests that all
protest movements may operate like gender
workshops. Indeed, activism can play a liberating role for women in permitting them to leave
the domestic universe and acquire social skills

previously inaccessible to them. This is the reason why, even in movements where women
are kept in positions of subjugation, mere participation can foster emancipation. The Black
Panther Party, for example, which planned to
link black liberation to a collective memory
reinvented and nourished from a precolonial
African culture dominated by men, served as
a place for political training and consciousness
raising about patriarchy and sexism.
Finally, it is clear that a social movement can
have profound and widespread socialization
effects on individuals in society by transforming their sense of identity and politicizing
the resulting social identification. Beyond the
results aforementioned, much work is needed
in order to build a comprehensive and solid
theoretical model for the study of the multiple socializing effects of social movements.
One possible point of departure is the Goffmanian notion of moral career, which directs
attention to the socializing effects of various
formal and informal organizational constraints
(status, proposed or reserved activities, leadership, and so on). Indeed, organizations do
a lot of work in socializing their members,
understood as role taking, which allows individuals to identify the different roles they face
and correctly fulfil their customary tasks. This
secondary socialization can, at times, assume
the form of explicit inculcations, the goal of
which is to homogenize activists categories of
thought and their way of acting within and
in the name of the organization. Most of the
time, know-how and activist wisdom amounts
to a practical sense, what Bourdieu refers to
as the anticipated adjustment to the requirements of a field, what the language of sports
calls the sense of the game (like sense of
place, the art of anticipation, etc.), acquired
over the course of a long dialectical process,
often described as a vocation, by which we
make ourselves according to what is making
us and we choose that by which we are chosen (Bourdieu 1980: 111112). This process
takes place outside of our conscious awareness.
If, following Gerth and Wright Mills (1954:
173), an institution leaves its mark on social

p o litical s o cialization and s o cial m ovements

actors who are part of it by modifying their
external conduct as well as their private life,
then we need to examine both the content
and the methods of the process of institutional
socialization. Three dimensions may be distinguished: the acquisition of know-how and
wisdom (resources), a vision of the world
(ideology), and the restructuring of sociability networks in relation to the construction
of individual and collective identities (social
networks and identities) (Fillieule 2010).
AVENUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
A major flaw in PS research stems from the
fact that it is largely ahistorical, doesnt put
emphasis on contextual effects and has been
remarkably unconcerned with the very process
of socialization. To be sure, these shortcomings
are not specific to PS studies. Observational
studies are rare in political science and for the
most part we study the product and assume it
is the result of the process. However, to study
process, the process needs to be observed, not
merely inferred. This is particularly the case in
PS. Largely because survey research has been
the dominant method of choice, research attention has typically focused on individuals and
their attributes as units of analysis. As a result,
literature is still scarce that has actually studied
and observed the manner by which agents do
or do not make influence attempts. To study
the process of PS, we need to think of different methods of inquiry and observation and
undoubtedly will have to resort to a variety of
methodologies, including field methodologies,
such as participant observation and ethnography, the collection of life histories, simulations,
and in-depth clinical techniques.
Beyond that radical change in methodologies, research could explore several avenues that
have been neglected until now. We conclude
by briefly mentioning some possible directions
among others. One potential line of investigation would be to explore more systematically
the socializing effects of political events and
communication about them (Tackett 2006).

Indeed, vivid political events should be important catalysts because they can have traumatic
effects and stimulate heavy information flows.
Events may have an impact at any age but
depending on the position in the life cycle,
the socializing effects will differ, from strengthening and substantiation for older people to
conversion and alternation for youngsters. The
hypothesis here, in line with the impressionable
years model, is that people should especially
recall events as important if they happened in
their adolescence or early adulthood.
Two directions could be taken here. First,
the effects of direct participation on political
protest should be explored. Developing further
research in this direction is all the more
important in the subfield of social movements
since some research suggests that younger
participants often favor nonconventional
modes of action such as demonstrations and
blockades, which then often constitute their
first significant involvement with the political
system, therefore having strong cognitive
effects. The dramatic growth of the antiglobalization movement all over the world, with
its strong appeal to young generations, is no
doubt a rich field for studying such processes
and their possible effects on subsequent
movements (Fillieule et al. 2004). Research
should also focus on the impact of political
events on engaged observers and even
bystander publics in the vein of Stewart,
Settles, and Winter (1998), who suggest that
those who were attentive to the movements
in the 1960s but not very active in them,
showed lasting political effects years later. Such
inquiries could also suggest some interesting
questions on how groundbreaking movements
can play an important role in resocializing
other groups to the politics of protest, as for
example the American civil rights movement
did with many subsequent movements.
Another fascinating field of research in PS
concerns intergenerational effects of political
socialization. Here again, social movement
research has a lot to say in various directions.
First, regarding parental influence on their
offspring in a context of political unrest, it is

p o litical s o cialization and s o cial m ovements

reasonable to ask: How long and in what magnitude parental influence persists over time in
periods of upheaval like those of the mid-1960s,
or when the political environment contains
forces antithetical to parental inclinations.
Understanding how political engagement plays
out in such cases, and tracing its implications
for intergenerational change, constitutes an
important challenge for future research. But
the prospect that offspring can also influence
parental attitudes, especially in domains in
which offspring introduce more modern
attitudes to families, should also be taken into
account. Recent research on protest marches of
2006 in the US (Pantoja, Menjivar, & Magana
2008) or more generally on political behavior
of early adult immigrants and its effects on
their parents is ripe territory for future work on
political socialization and social movements.
SEE ALSO: Commitment; Consciousness,
conscience, and social movements; Conversion
and new religious movements; Generational and
cohort analysis; Outcomes, cultural; Participation
in social movements; Political generation.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

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Bandler, M., Passy, F., and Sommier, I.
(2004) Laltermondialisme en reseaux: trajectoires militantes, multipositionnalite et formes
de lengagement: les participants du contresommet du G8 dEvian (The antiglobalization
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Gurin, P., and Epps, E. (1975) Black Consciousness,

Identity and Achievement. Wiley, New York.
Hess, R.D., and Torney, J.V. (1967) The Development
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