ABSTRACT
Political socialization, which is how people develop their political orientations, is an important topic for both academics and consultants. For the academic community, studies of political socialization help to explain shifts in political behavior while identifying those agents, media, family, party, peers, friends, schools that can affect political attitudes. Such information is critical for understanding the modern political process, but the information gleaned from such studies goes far beyond politics and reaches into a broad realm of socialization into modern culture. How we develop our political attitudes is closely tied to how we develop our self-concept and how we learn the roles that guide our lives in modern society. People who study socialization from the perspective of the individual as the primary unit of analysis have generally sought to identify those agents that are most likely to influence a child's political orientations. Those agents generally viewed as having the strongest influence are the family, the news media, and political parties.
