Parental Transmission and the Importance of the (Noncausal) Effects of Education on Political Engagement: Missing the Forest for the Trees

By most accounts, an important prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy is engaged citizens. A very prominent explanation of variation in political engagement suggests that parental transmission through socialization accounts individual-level differences engagement. In this paper, we show, using large Danish twin survey ( N = 2,071), classic formulations theory can be supplemented by findings from the biopolitics literature, allowing us to disentangle when heritable factors are and predictors We show as level family politicization consistency increases, influence genes decreases. take imply compensate (genetic) individual foster increased only focusing on “causal” effect education, missing forest trees.