Pathways to politics: a sequence analysis of political apathy and involvement

Publication type

Journal Article

Series Number

Authors

Publication date

August 21, 2025

Summary:

Understanding inequality in political involvement is a core goal of political science. Previous research has examined specific life-course influences, but there is limited knowledge about the diverse trajectories young citizens follow to become politically engaged or apathetic. This study employs sequence analysis to identify prevailing trajectories of political involvement from adolescence to young adulthood in Germany and the United Kingdom. For a surprisingly large share, their political future of either apathy or involvement is already determined by age 17, or even as early as age 11. Only about 19% develop involvement between age 17 and 25 and only 24% between age 11 and 15. Studying predictors of individual trajectories points to strong parental influences, while personal experiences can foster later involvement for a sizeable sub-group. These results show an under-appreciated diversity of political socialisation trajectories and point to an urgent need to study the interaction of parental and personal factors shaping them.

Published in

West European Politics

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2025.2543204

ISSN

01402382

Subjects

Notes

Code: Replication code can be found in the corresponding author’s Harvard Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/sjungkunz

Online Early

Open Access

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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