Italian new voters: talis pater qualis filius? Mass media and politics in the passage to the adulthood

The final purpose of this project will be to analyze the relationship between parents’ and sons’ votes, controlling mainly for the interest in politics, the exposure to political information and the degree of exposure to family political discourse. The literature has pointed out a number of evidence for the finding that new voters tend to vote for the same party as their parents do. Nonetheless, my main concern is for finding some evidence that could support the hypothesis that not only there are some reasons that explain the tendency of new voters to vote for their parent’s party, but also that the same reasons can explain the voting behaviour of new voters that do not vote for their parent’s party. In other words, the question is: what percentage of new voters that vote for their parent’s party do it simply because their parents did, and what percentage can be explained on the same basis on which the “non-parental voters” are explained? However, since I’ve just discovered by myself how difficult it is to collect data from the very beginning, I was not able to carry on all the analysis before the ECPR General Conference deadline. Therefore, I will present a first analysis of the data I collected showing how I will proceed. I hope the paper will still be of interest, at least for the data it will present.