we examine the political socialization process in immigrant families based on the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS). We find that international migration disrupts the intergenerational transmission of political engagement: associations between voting, political interest, and parent and child socioeconomic status are weaker in immigrant families than in families without a migration background. In particular, the voting behavior of immigrants and their children in particular is only partially explained by standard models of political socialization. In contrast, characteristics specific to the international migration process, including sending country experiences, characteristics of the migration journey, and the pathway to citizenship are critical determinants of voting for immigrant parents, and through political socialization, for their UK-raised children.

As of 2019, more than one in four children under the age of 18 years in the United Kingdom has at least one foreign-born parent (Fernandez-Reino and Sumption 2022). When this immigrant “second generation” comes of age, they will form a substantial proportion of the British electorate, making the question of if and how they will participate in political life increasingly important. This young population is incredibly diverse across a variety of dimensions: their parents are postcolonial labor and family reunification migrants, skilled visa holders from across the globe coming for work and study, as well as EU members who (formerly) enjoyed access to the United Kingdom via free movement. Their parents were socialized in dictatorships, former Soviet states, wealthy democracies, and poor ones. While most will have obtained citizenship by the time their children come of age, the naturalization process is not universal, with likely consequences for the transmission of political knowledge and engagement in immigrant families. Finally, immigration introduces greater socioeconomic variability alongside greater variability in political socialization: the families of the foreign born are more likely than the children of UK-born parents to occupy positions at both tails of the educational and income distribution (Fernandez-Reino 2022).

Given the greater heterogeneity in political experience and socioeconomic resources among the foreign born in the United Kingdom, we argue that we should expect the intergenerational transmission of political outcomes in immigrant families to unfold differently than would be expected from standard political socialization frameworks designed for the general population (Neundorf and Smets 2017). Having spent their formative years abroad, immigrant parents lack first-hand political experiences and accumulated everyday exposure to the receiving country political system. Many of them arrive from countries where democracy may be poorly functioning and education systems less developed, disrupting the expected positive associations between educational attainment, political interest and political participation (Kasara and Suryanarayan 2015). Even after migrating, most immigrants will also have spent significant time outside the receiving country polity: naturalization requires money, effort and time, resources which may be in short supply as immigrants seek to establish themselves and their families in the initial period after their arrival. A relative deficit of directly transferable political interest and understanding, as well as a lengthy period outside the polity, may limit political engagement and weaken parent–child political socialization in immigrant families. The upshot is that parental characteristics — such as their educational attainment or their political interest — may be less predictive for the political engagement of the children of immigrants.

In contrast to standard vertical political socialization models that forefront the transmission process from parent to child, we posit that specifically international characteristics of immigrant families related to the migration experience itself (Luthra, Waldinger and Soehl 2018) can help us to understand variation in second generation political engagement. Other scholars have fruitfully incorporated influences specific to international migration in models of immigrant political engagement by including characteristics of the sending country alongside citizenship and generational status to predict voting among Latinos in the United States (Ramakrishnan and Espenshade 2001), demonstrating a positive association between voter turnout rates in the sending country and the voting intention of the foreign born in Europe (Voicu and Comşa 2014), and by examining how access to citizenship shapes civic participation of Muslim immigrants and their descendants in Canada and France (Laxer, Reitz and Simon 2020).

Yet, very few studies to date have applied international models of political engagement specifically to the children of immigrants, and even fewer have examined how the process of international migration might alter the intra-familial political socialization process itself. This is largely due to data restrictions, as it is rare for surveys to contain information on the political engagement of both immigrant parents and their adult children.1 This study is thus one of the first to examine how the sending country political system, the naturalization process, and sending and receiving country ties exert a direct influence on the political outcomes of the foreign born and their children, and whether they moderate the political socialization process in immigrant families. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study to examine these issues with nationally representative data, including direct reports of both parents and children initially observed in their parental household (rather than self-reports of children only), and to focus on the British context.