American political candidates are forecast to spend as much as $12 billion by next November to put ads on airwaves, texts on phones, and signs on lawns.
Yet new research from Harvard Business School finds that no amount of money can undo an essential factor that defines someone’s political outlook: The political bent of the neighborhood where they grew up—and especially where they spent their teen years.
Beyond just parental influence, environmental factors such as friends, teachers, and media environment play a statistically significant role in determining party affiliations and election participation, according to a study that looks at registration records from 2012 to 2021 of more than 15 million voters aged 18 to 24.
“We show that, to some extent, our affiliation as a Democratic or Republican voter comes from influences from our childhood.”
The study found that young people who lived in counties where voter registration favored either Republicans or Democrats leaned toward the majority party at the time of their first election. In fact, where people grow up makes their politics 40-50 percent more similar to their neighbors’.
As an off-year election cycle wraps up, and the US gears up for the coming presidential contest, the results highlight the challenge candidates face each year as they seek to sway voters to their side, says Vincent Pons, the Michael B. Kim Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and one of the report’s co-authors.
“Our paper contributes to the debate on how malleable voters’ views might be,” Pons says. “We show that, to some extent, our affiliation as a Democratic or Republican voter comes from influences from our childhood … so you can see that it might take a lot to persuade us to go against those influences.”
Pons conducted the study with Harvard doctoral students Sahil Chinoy and Martin Koenen; Jacob Brown, an assistant professor at Boston University; and Enrico Cantoni, senior assistant professor at the University of Bologna in Italy.
Does moving change a person’s political beliefs?
Pons and his co-authors based their study on yearly nationwide snapshots of all registered voters from 2012 to 2021.
The researchers focused on young people who moved at least once during their formative years by correlating voter data, including party registration, with address histories. The team specifically looked at which party young people affiliated with in their first elections and compared it with the amount of time spent at their new addresses.
Pons says structuring the study as a comparison between those who moved and those who stayed was fundamental to isolating the impact of neighborhoods on political beliefs. The strategy was to measure the “extent to which a voter whose family moves to a new neighborhood during their childhood adopts a political behavior similar to their permanent-resident peers in that neighborhood,” the paper explains.
Pons and his team also examine the impact of the environment on political participation by looking at turnout data. The more that young people voted in a particular county, the more likely the newcomers were also to cast a ballot.
Environmental factors that shape party affiliation and turnout include the influence of peers and teachers, the political competitiveness of a particular county or state, and the intensity of the media coverage in the area.
Another reason the teen years are so critical
The researchers determined that growing up in a county where young voters’ peers were 10 percentage points more likely to become Republicans made them 4.7 percentage points more likely to become Republicans themselves. The effect was 4.1 percentage points for the likelihood to register as Democrats.
“The environment in which people grow up makes their future partisanship and political participation become 40 percent to 50 percent more similar to the people they grow up around,” the study states.
The depth of the data gave researchers a unique opportunity to compare political outcomes between siblings from the same family—specifically, when one sibling spends more time than another in the destination county. On average, the child who spent longer in the new county was likelier to adopt its political persuasions than the child with less exposure.
Given that the siblings shared the same mother and father, “we were able to determine that differences in their behavior cannot be explained by their parents,” Pons says.
The impact of the environment is magnified, Pons adds, when moves correspond to the adolescent years. “It’s really quite striking,” Pons explains. “What we found is that beginning at age 13, and all the years after, [environment] seemed to matter four times as much to who you become as a political actor than earlier ages in life.”
What else can we learn about voters?
Technology and data availability have created new opportunities to study voter and candidate behavior. For example, researchers can now chart timelines based on candidates’ messages to voters using websites dating back to the early 2000s.
Pons and his team intend to explore their dataset further and probe how parents shape their children’s political beliefs and the interplay of these influences.
“We could use this method to measure the impact [of childhood neighborhood] on brand attachment.”
“Say you have Democratic parents but grew up in a Republican neighborhood. How do these factors come together?” Pons asks.
Other disciplines, such as business, can also mimic the study’s design to look at questions in their fields. “For instance,” Pons says, “we could use this method to measure the impact [of childhood neighborhood] on brand attachment.”
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Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu.
Image: HBSWK