The school climate effects evident in our results, even when compared with the effects of
parental socialization, were impressive. Adolescents were clearly swayed by the balance of
opinion in their high school, so much so that those effects were sometimes evident three decades
later. Such influence was particularly evident in the case of party identification, where school
effects produced the most lasting imprint. Youthful partisan affiliations were likely to persist if
they were reinforced in adolescence by like-minded peers, resulting in party identities at age 50
partly dependent on the partisan environments experienced thirty years before.
The findings concerning racial attitudes and tolerance yielded important contrasts with
those for party identification. During adolescence, school effects were more potent for the former
than for the latter in two ways—in terms of the absolute size of the school effect coefficients we
observed and in terms of the relative influence of parents and schools. Parental influence was
unquestionably the more potent influence when it came to partisan identification, but was
unquestionably the less potent influence on youth attitudes concerning race and tolerance. At the
same time, however, while school climate left a lasting imprint on adult partisan identification,
school effects on racial attitudes and tolerance tended to dissipate more rapidly.
The intriguing question is then what lies behind this variation. We think that it reflects
both rather enduring aspects of political socialization and relatively unique features of the broader
political context that characterized the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the “impressionable years” in
the political development of those we studied. On the enduring side are two arguments. First, the
finding that parents trump schools on party identification but their relative influence switches on
the other attitudes is fully consistent with other research on parental transmission (e.g., Jennings
and Niemi 1974, Jennings, Stoker, and Bowers 2005), which finds parents to be much more
influential with respect to partisan orientations than on other matters. The centrality of
partisanship as an identity, the consistency with which it is held by parents and thus the
consistency of the cues transmitted to children, and the frequent opportunities afforded by
election contexts for partisan cues to be communicated all work to enhance parental influence.
Second, as we have shown in this paper, the more rapid decay of school context effects for racial
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Convention