What Happens When Social Pressures Collide? The Role of Environmental Pressures Throughout Life

How do competing social influences shape individual partisanship over the course of the life cycle? People enter and exit a host of environments over the course of the lifespan, and these environments provide social pressures that can conflict or reinforce early socialized attitudes. Socialization could be an agent for either opinion change, or opinion stability. Using the Youth-Parent Socialization Study and constructing partisan environmental measures at the county-level, I explore this question. The findings demonstrate that environments exert significant socializing influence over the lifespan, moderating the persistence of early forces. This helps to reconcile two competing perspectives on the enduring nature of familial socialization. When environments throughout life provide reinforcing social pressures, parental influence persists over time. However, when early socialized influence is challenged over time by the political environment that citizens reside in, the influence of early parental socialization is offset and nullified.