Socializing Policy Feedback: The Long-Term Effects of Adolescent Program Participation on Adult Party Identification

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241268825
• Author: Nathan K. Micatka,Julianna Pacheco
• Date: 01 December 2024

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(4) 1350–1363

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129241268825

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Socializing Policy Feedback: The

Long-Term Effects of Adolescent Program

Participation on Adult Party Identif‌ication

Nathan K. Micatka

1

and Julianna Pacheco

1



Abstract

Despite the expectation that welfare participation—because of its direct monetary payments—fosters strong at-

tachments to the Democratic Party, the evidence to date suggests that welfare is unrelated to party identif‌ication. The

majority of this research, however, focuses on adults, when partisan development is over. We argue that adolescent

welfare participation may serve as a class-based signal that reinforces identif‌ication with the Democratic Party. Our

inferences are generally consistent with this line of reasoning, but we also f‌ind important differences across race and

ethnicity. Depending on the model, the likelihood of identifying with the Democratic Party in adulthood for white

respondents is anywhere from 9 to 16% points higher for respondents who grew up in families that received welfare

compared to those who did not have adolescent welfare participation. Other results, however, suggest a negative

association between adolescent welfare use and identif‌ication with the Democratic Party for non-Hispanic black re-

spondents. We conclude that despite the fact that adult welfare experiences lead to political disengagement, adolescent

program participation can be sites of partisan learning.

Keywords

policy feedback, adolescence, welfare, partisanship, race

In 2021, approximately 37.9 million people—including

15 percent of people under the age of 18—lived in poverty

across the United States (Census Newsroom 2023). Of

these people, roughly 3 out of 4 received some form of

government assistance (Minton and Giannarelli 2019).

Receipt of government assistance matters for political be-

havior. Experience with means-tested programs is associ-

ated with low levels of eff‌icacy, political trust, and

participation (Soss 1999), but is unrelated to broad orien-

tations like core values (Schneider and Jacoby 2003)and

partisan attachments (Galvin and Thurston 2017,2020). To

the extent that partisanship matters for policy feedback more

generally, it seems to act as a modif‌ier by muting, under-

mining, or, in some cases, exacerbating the relationship

between policy experience and public opinion (see, for

instance, B´

eland, Campbell, and Weaver 2022;Mettler,

Jacobs, and Zhu 2023;Oberlander and Weaver 2015).

Thus, despite the expectation that welfare participation—

because of its direct monetary payments—fosters strong

attachments to the Democratic Party, program participation

is generally unrelated to party attachments.

The most widely accepted explanation for this failed

relationship is that negative experiences with welfare,

especially means-tested programs, erode support among

its constituents. Despite having an “unusually visible

material stake in government policies,”means-tested

welfare recipients learn that they are at the whims of

bureaucratic discretion that is both “unconstrained by

rules and unresponsive to client demands”(Soss 1999,

363–367). Benef‌iciaries come to see their experiences as a

ref‌lection of the broader political system whereby they are

second-class citizens with little political power.

By contrast, political socialization theories highlight the

importance of adolescent experiences for the development of

partisan attachments (Alwin, Cohen, and Newcomb 1991;

1

The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Nathan K. Micatka, Department of Political Science, The University of

Iowa, 341 Schaeffer Hall, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA.

Email: nathan-micatka@uiowa.edu