Values and Political Preferences in Childhood

Studies of youth political development focus primarily on political socialization and salient events, while paying relatively less attention to important individual differences among children themselves, such as values. We administer an original survey to a sample of 10-to-12-year-olds and show that the distribution of their values is similar to that of their parents and a diverse sample of adults; that children's value priorities strongly predict their political preferences; and that one dimension of value priorities continues to predict political preferences even after adjusting for parental values and political preferences. Taken together, our findings suggest that pre-teens already use their own value priorities to organize their political attitudes, which emphasizes the importance of children's independent attributes in their political development, and lends support to the idea that personal values provide a foundation for political ideology.