Roles Reversed: Trickle-Up Political Socialization Among Latino Immigrant Families in the United States

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the phenomenon of reverse socialization among Latino immigrants living in the US. Reverse socialization challenges our conventional top-down understanding of political socialization and asserts that socialization is a bidirectional process in which children may also influence their parents’ political beliefs. My main research question asks whether the children of Latino immigrants reverse socialize their parents. From this primary, I derive three secondary questions of interest: Does the immigration status of family members affect parent-child political discussions? Does having parent-child political discussions affect parent’s political opinions, whether that be through the strength or partisan alignment of these opinions? Do these discussions affect parent’s political knowledge? To measure political beliefs, I use a subset of 2020 American National Election Study (ANES) questions related selected using sparse principal component analysis. I then use these same questions in semi-structured interviews. From these interviews, I obtain a small snowball sample of primarily undocumented, Latino immigrant parents from various parts of the US, and I compare them to the ANES Latino population. I run limited statistical analysis on this small sample and analyze trends noted in the qualitative section of the interviews. Statistically significant results provide evidence for reverse socialization, but in a way that nuances the foundational theory. These results have implications for new avenues of political engagement as greater political engagement among immigrant youth may also benefit their parents indirectly by providing them knowledge of US politics, especially those who have yet to be fully socialized into US politics.