Political identity
[15] The tradition of research into parental transmission of the political identity was initially developed at a time when two-parent families were more common than they are today.
It is therefore highly likely that a change in family transmission patterns will emerge in future studies, given that divorced parents present more political disagreements.
[17] Nevertheless, according to some authors, individual personality becomes a particularly important factor in situations where power is concentrated, institutions are in conflict or major changes are taking place.
From a psychosocial perspective, van Stekelenburg and Klandermans[31] see it above all as a process intimately linked to relations between groups, where individuals adopt radical trajectories as a result of interactions between identity dynamics and features of the socio-political context.
Firstly, supranational factors such as technology, information flows and ideologies (e.g. democracy, justice) have a significant influence on radical groups.
The authors also note that the way in which national policies have decided to repress radical movements is a significant factor in the radicalisation process of certain groups.
In this respect, an article by Lichter and Rothman[34] concludes that radicalism is associated with particular family characteristics and a series of psychological traits linked in particular to measures of narcissism, motivations concerning power and lack of affiliation.
[36] By way of example, by mobilising this type of argument, Berman[37] provides insights into the destructive and even self-destructive behaviour of the Taliban and other radical religious militias.
Originally, the dominant view was that party identification was a very stable element despite contextual events, constituting a filter for the interpretation of political information.
Advocates of this current clearly support the idea that individuals can change their party of reference in response to their attitudes on specific political issues, particularly when these are salient, emotionally relevant and polarized.
[45] For this to happen, generational effects require that the individuals concerned are psychologically open to that period of life, and that there are important political experiences at the corresponding historical moment.
Most evidence suggests that the liberal or left-wing orientation has not only persisted since that time,[47] but has also been passed on to some extent to the descendants of these former young activists.
[48] In an article published in 1998, Stewart, Settles and Winter show that the "committed observers" of that period, i.e. those who were attentive to movements without actually being active in them, developed strong political effects over the long term.
While some of these observations can be explained by the fact that young people have historically been less politically active than older adults, some analyses suggest that they reflect a decline in social capital that reduces involvement in collective forms of organization.
[50] Several researchers within the literature attempted to highlight the effect that historical developments can have on the way in which individuals tend to identify themselves politically.
Firstly, based on the observation of differences in political identification between certain populations, authors have tried to analyse and understand how history can help to explain such divergences.
To illustrate this approach, Alain Noël and Jean-Philippe Therien's[3] study uses historical arguments to make sense of the differences observed in political analyses.
The authors conducted wide-ranging survey across the world in an attempt to analyse the ways in which people identify themselves on the left-right spectrum and the meanings they give to this continuum.
They show that public opinion in South America, with the exception of Uruguay, did not make sense of political identities as being right-wing or left-wing.
By contrast, the vast majority of countries in the former Soviet Bloc experienced a period of post-communist transition during which ideological polarisation took hold in the political landscape.
The period of democratisation generally saw the emergence of an opposition between ex-communists and anti-communists, which led public opinion to internalise political identities along the left-right continuum.
These authors therefore emphasise that the left-right spectrum, and hence systems of political perception and identification, are above all social constructions linked to particular historical contexts.
For example, some studies suggest that the high level of support for the Nazis in the 1930s may have arisen from the severe trauma caused by living conditions at the turn of the century.
The implementation of this type of political system was, in their view, directly linked to a gradual increase in partisan identification among the population.
In a large study, Pippa Norris looks at the influence of the electoral system on the way in which political identifications are spread across the population.
Box-Steffensmeier, de Boef and Lin[66] conclude their article by saying that the gender gap is caused by a combination of social changes, such as the evolution of family structure or the increase in the percentage of women assuming full household responsibilities, economic opportunities, government priorities and political actors.
Similarly, economists Lena Edlund and Rohini Pande explain the shift of women to the left over the last thirty years of the 20th century by the decline of marriage.
In an article published in 2000, Inglehart and Norris[65] looked at post-industrial societies and first observed that a gap similar to that in the USA began to develop in the 1990s.
Given this finding, the authors deduced that this gender gap could be a generational factor, and took advantage of the articulation of this hypothesis to invite future research on the issue to look more deeply into this line of thought.
Accordingly, Mainwaring and Zoco[76] showed that a high level of partisan identification within a population would promote the stability of the existing party system.
