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Electoral participation and intergenerational transmission among Turkish migrants in Western Europe

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Abstract

This study investigates whether immigration affects the extent to which children of migrants are likelier to vote if their parents vote (and vice versa). It combines intergenerational transmission theories with migrant political participation theories. Existing studies of migration and intergenerational transmission mainly focus on (Latino) immigrants in the United States and have not assessed migration’s true impact through comparison with non-migrants from the origin society. This study analyses unique data on Turkey-Europe migration, which include migrant and non-migrant child-parent dyads, applying logistic regression analysis. The results show a clear ‘intrahousehold similarity in electoral participation’ among migrant dyads in European national elections, which is weaker (but present) among the non-migrant dyads in Turkey. Though migration thus seems to strengthen transmission, the effect is only present if the child grew up in Europe, suggesting that children also stimulate their parents’ political engagement. Additionally, results show that the electoral participation of parents in the Turkish elections is not associated with the electoral participation of the adult children in the European national elections. Taken together, the analyses indicate that the underlying mechanism of transmission is not just one of (two-way) political socialization; ‘household mobilization’ also plays an important role.

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Notes

  1. In the 2000Families data, 98 per cent of the respondents migrated for economic and family reasons (see data section).

  2. Germany (708), Belgium (398), the Netherlands (216), France (180), Denmark (150), Sweden (136), Austria (125), Switzerland (29), Norway (20), Italy (11) and the United Kingdom (2).

  3. A total of 675 hold Turkish citizenship.

  4. Additional modelling, including this third group, shows that the citizens with a migrant background whose parents are not allowed to vote are far more similar to the group whose parents do not vote than to the respondents with voting parents. This can be explained by the mobilization and the socialization mechanisms. The socialization mechanism can also be used to explain that this group is not completely similar to the respondents with abstaining parents, since some parents without citizenship might find voting important but some are simply not allowed to.

  5. Respondents without a partner were given the mean scores of the respondent with a partner. Because the model includes dummies indicating whether the respondent had a partner, this procedure led to unbiased estimates of the variables (Allison, 2001).

  6. Migrants hardly voted in Turkish national elections. ‘Overseas’ voting was simply not possible in Turkey: the new law allowing so passed in parliament in 2012 (Küçükkoşum, 2012). The respondents who say they did probably mandated others or voted during a stay in Turkey.

  7. Estimating a model with the parent’s electoral participation in both Turkish and European elections (226 parents hold dual citizenship) confirms the results from Models 2 and 3. The logged odds for parent’s participation in European elections was 1.30 (P=0.02), and 0.12 (P=0.85) for the Turkish elections.

  8. This might also explain why fewer effects are found for the control variables in Model 4.

  9. As the sample only included a limited number of respondents not born in Europe, I also estimated trimmed-down logistic models for both groups with only the parent’s electoral participation, education, age (as well as the quadratic term) and the country dummies, confirming the results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Radboud University, P.O. Box 9104, Nijmegen, 6500 HE, The Netherlands

    Niels Spierings

  2. London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Niels Spierings

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Spierings, N. Electoral participation and intergenerational transmission among Turkish migrants in Western Europe. Acta Polit 51, 13–35 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2014.26

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