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Political Socialization: Primacy And Recency Approach

Decent Essays

Political socialisation is the process towards the individual learns and starts to grasp the political and social system in which he is a part of and he has to deal with. (Greenberg, 1970, pp. 3-4)
Some scholars have been theorized two approaches to the theory of political socialisation: Primacy and Recency approach.
In this essay I will look into the two approaches and the factors which influence people political orientation such as religion, gender and race. Then I will focus on my personal political socialisation. Indeed since I was a child, I have been always interested within politics, which was steadily present in most of the familiar conversation. Therefore in my experience I have been extremely influenced by my family and my father …show more content…

(Hyman cited in Shiraev and Sobel, 2006, pp 94-95). Basically when we are child we are much more reactive to external stimuli. For instance a child can easily learn a foreign language. So children are deeply influenced by who is around them. That means that their political or religion prospective is strongly conditioned by his parents, friends, teachers and so on. Glass argues that the relationship between parents and siblings is the primary influence to the political develop of the child. (Glass, Bengtson and Dunham, 1986, pp 685-687.) The argument which is brought up by primacy theorist is that what we learn as a child, It will be something long …show more content…

As a result Zaller explains that if we learn something during the adult life, its impact will be greater to our personality. (cited in Shiraev and Sobel, 2006, pp 94) Therefore what we learn from our experiences, It can deeply effect our personality, more than what we acquire during the childhood. It means a re-socialization of what we learnt in our childhood, such as values and beliefs. Many factors can change your orientation such as ethnicity, teachers or friends.
I am inclined to believe that in developing my personal political orientation, I have not been influenced by some factors such as religion and gender.
Firstly as far as I am concerned, I think a democratic state has to be laic and It cannot deal with any religious rules. A country cannot be based on clerical laws. Despite many countries are managed by a theocratic government.
Secondly a person, who is going to run the country, must be elected for his or her capacity and not for being a man or a woman. Even if many women were important figures within the political panorama such as Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, who said that “in politics if you want anything said ask a man, want anything done ask a woman” (Cited in Swatridge, 2014, pp

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