Political socialization across places differential effects on multiculturalist attitudes in urban and rural areas?

Extensive literature shows that inhabitants from urbanized areas tend to have more multicultural attitudes than those from rural areas, and these differences seem especially pronounced among younger generations. To explore why, we study ‘the formative years of adolescence’ and focus on an often-overlooked mechanism in the literature: political socialization through discussing politics with various actors such as parents, peers, and teachers. We argue that political socialization differently affects multicultural attitudes in urban and rural areas, and test our hypotheses by using the Dutch Adolescent Panel on Democratic Values (DAPDV) dataset, a representative panel study among adolescents in the Netherlands between ages 11 and 16. This allows us to not only analyze whether the associations between political discussion and multicultural attitudes differ between urban and rural areas, but to also disentangle influence from selection effects. We find that political socialization through parents and peers is related to multicultural attitudes differently in urban and rural contexts. It is associated with more multiculturalism in urban areas but not in rural areas. These associations are fully the result of selection mechanisms, and no support for the direct influence of political socialization on multicultural attitudes is found. Overall, our findings stress the importance of further studying the role of political socialization in adolescence to help us understand increasing geographic political polarization across many democratic societies.