Alexandre Arnout

Political involvement is highly unequal across citizens. This paper investigates how socialization, first by parents and then by peers, shapes political involvement and generates heterogeneity across individuals and partisan groups. I develop a two-stage model of cultural transmission in which parents choose socialization effort to transmit their partisan affiliation, and children then decide on their level of political involvement by weighing the benefits of engagement against the cost of interacting with peers from the opposing partisan group. Affective polarization plays a central role, operating through both parental intolerance and the cost of cross-partisan interactions. I show that minority-group parents invest more in political transmission, generating higher average political interest among minority children. When affective polarization is sufficiently high, this socialization advantage offsets the size disadvantage of the minority group, which then exhibits greater political involvement than the majority, both on average and in total.