Jennings, Stoker (2008) Politics Across Generations: FamilyTransmission Reexamined

Four conclusions: (1) despite changes in environment (technology etc) parental influence is as strong in the 90s as in was in the 60s (2) the direct transmission model is robust (3) adoption of parents political orientation is strongest with the home is highly politicized and when it is a two-arent home (4) the earlier the adoption, the longer it lasts. Summary of Jennings & Niemi (1968) findings: "Transmission rates tended to vary in a systematic fashion according to type of political trait. The more concrete, affect-laden, and central the object in question, the more successful was the transmission. More abstract, ephemeral, and historically conditioned attributes were much less successfully passed on. Salience of the political object for the parents was an important conditioner of successful reproduction, as was perceptual accuracy on the part of the child (Acock and Bengston 1980; Percheron and Jennings 1981; Tedin 1980; Westholm 1999). The presence of politically homogeneous parents, and other agents allied with the parents, enhanced the fidelity of transmission (Jennings and Niemi 1974, ch. 6; Tedin 1980). Contextual properties such as larger opinion climates (Jennings and Niemi 1974, 81-82, 161-62) and party systems (Westholm and Niemi 1992) also affected within-family consonance. These specifications and qualifications also lent support to social learning theory explanations of how children come to resemble their parents more in some respects than others" Five new questions, which are the motivation of the paper: (1) are transmissions cohort specific? this question is answered by comparing the original Jennings & Niemi pairs to other pairs. (2) Two-parent home transmissions v. One-parent home transmissions answered by using diad v. triad data from original dataset (3) does the strength of the cue matter (i.e. how highly politicized the home is) (4) how much of the similar parent-child environment is actually at play? (5) how long does the early adoption of political characteristics sustain? Do those who have adopted their parents’ orientations differ later in life from those who do not?

McAdam, Doug. (1989) The Biographical Consequences of Activism

McAdam, Doug, The Biographical Consequences of Activism (1989)

Research Question: What happens to individuals who experience dangerous forms of activism?
Popular conception is that activists of the 1960’s “sold-out” and became yuppies.

Implication is that the activism of the 60’s was a developmental phase that the participants grew out of- they sewed their wild oats.

However, there are not too many public examples of the hard-core activist turn mainstream citizen.

Only 2-4% of baby-boomers actually took an active role in activism in the 1960’s

Inconsistent with accounts from former activists and studies

Conversion vs. Alternation

Conversion is the process of radical transformation in the lifestyle/ worldview of a person

Alternation is the developmental changes in personality/ lifestyle.

Degree of importance of activism the degree of conversion or alternation
Methodological problems with former studies of activism

Longitudinal studies insufficiently help understand the impact of activism vs period effects

Has sufficient time lapsed between iterations to identify enduring changes to attitude

Studies draw from narrow geographical region

Lack of before and after data on activists

Design:

330 participants- all applicants to the 1964 Freedom Summer Project

Two groups- Participants (212) and No-shows (118)

Attitude of individuals prior to Freedom Summer assessed using applications- participants and no-shows similar for many different variables.

Questioners sent out to determine change in attitudes with the treatment being the Freedom Summer experience.
Results:

Both groups showed high levels of political involvement prior to freedom summer

Results broken into short and long term categories

Short Term (political):

Freedom summer volunteers far more politically active than no-shows

Gap in activity between participants and no-shows increases after freedom summer

Individuals who maintain contact with other Freedom Summer volunteers have the highest levels of political activism

Long Term (political):

Participants remain more politically active than no-shows

Freedom Summer experience created conversion effect in individuals politically

Participation a predictor of long term political organizational affiliation, which is also related to current activism

Short term (personal):

Later full-time employment for participants

Choice of career and marital partners affected by activism more by participants

Married at the same rate between groups

Participants enrolled less in school during the 1960’s

Long term (personal):

Higher incomes by the no-shows- influenced by earlier entry into workforce

Lower income of participants influenced by seeking work in activism

Higher rates of divorce among participants

Conclusion

Freedom Summer had a long term impact on participants

Experienced conversion effect as opposed to alternation by no-shows

Lifelong effect as opposed to merely a short-term effect

Alwin, Cohen, and Newcomb. (1991) Political Attitudes over the Lifespan: The Bennington Women after Fifty Year

Alwin, Cohen, and Newcomb. (1991). Political Attitudes over the Lifespan: The Bennington Women after Fifty Years. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Chapter 2: Newcomb’s Bennington Studies: The Impressionable Years

Bennington College: Women’s college in rural Vermont with an emphasis on personal growth and freedom. Also set to extend advanced educational skills to women. “experimental”
Bennington as a reference group: reference groups are groups through which people are introduced to new values and norms of an environment. Here the main value of interest is independence from parents and personal status in the (college) community. Also related to becoming more progressive and “liberated”
The women: mostly came from upper-class, conservative families. Fairly isolated, especially from public issues. Entered college between 1932 and 1938. all students asked to participate who were at the college between 1935-1938.
Change in Progressivism:

-progressivism/liberal outlook measured with PEP score

-college became more liberal in the aggregate, especially domestic issues

-aging/development effect: regardless of year of entry, women became more liberal as they went through school.

-some problem with selection/mortality: results could be due to more conservative women dropping out of the school/study. Newcomb has rejected these as not likely to have confounded the results

-“A gradual process of political divergence from parents” over time-Newcomb, 1943. He did not actually test this as a bivariate relationship, but subsequent analysis roughly supports this for those women who came from conservative families (60% stayed Republican with conservative parents while 90% stayed liberal from liberal families.)

-some evidence of persistence of liberal attitudes after leaving Bennington.

-slight divergence over time between literature/social sciences and science/music in PEP scores, but this does not explain overall aggregate changes.

-liberal students more concerned with “theory and harmony” while conservatives more likely to be interested in economics and politics/power. (pg 49)
Informational Environment:

-progressive ideas spread throughout community, not just in relevant courses ie social sciences.

Why?- closely integrated community and homogenous non-conservative faculty.

-uniform experience across curriculum

-less conservative students were more likely to be leaders and have closer friendships. Women rated more liberal classmates as closer friends.

**I think this article did not belong in the Life cycle week. Maybe the events week or the “what is learned when” week. Maybe even in generations. But it only briefly talks about persistence or life-long effects. The chapter even says that it will talk more about the long-term effects in a later chapter. ??**

Jennings and Stoker (2004) Social Trust and Civic Engagement across Time and Generations

Background Information: Social capital helps solve collective action problems (macro level) because—the conventional wisdom holds—individuals can’t work together towards a common goal if they don’t trust each other. Social capital creates virtuous circle such that being involved in civic associations and volunteer work not helps develop political skills and fosters trust and confidence in others, and vice versa, thus enabling collective action to address social and political needs. Previous indicators of social capital include: (1) trust in one’s fellow human beings and (2) civic engagement, i.e. involvement in voluntary organizations and the performance of volunteer work

Research Problem: The social capital literature lacks research taking a trans-generational, developmental perspective in order to sharply delineate intergenerational differences in social trust and civic engagement, their origins and long-term development, and their interconnections over time. The literature has not been able to disentangle life-cycle and generational effects. Further, it isn’t clear whether individuals have stable attitudes with regard to trust and engagement. Finally, the literature fails to evaluate the interconnections between social trust and civic engagement at the individual level.

Research Questions: (1) Which generation is more “responsible” for the decline in social capital: the Baby Boomers or the Generation Xers? (2) Are there generational differences in the extent to which trust and engagement are stable attributes of individuals? (3) Does pre-adult involvement in voluntary organizations build predispositions and skills that have long-lasting consequences, encouraging civic engagement later on in life?

Methodology: Jennings and Stoker (2004) focus on social trust, organizational involvement, and voluntary work. They utilize three-wave, longitudinal panel data (originating from 1965 study of high school seniors).

1st Generation includes the high school seniors’ parents, fits nicely into Putnam’s (2000) idealized “civic generation” and Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.”
2nd Generation includes the Baby Boomers; important: the Baby Boomers and the “protest generation” are synonyms.
3rd Generation includes people born after 1968, the Gen Xers.
To measure participation in voluntary organizations, all respondents except G2 in 1965 and G3 in 1997 reacted to a long list of organizations, indicating whether they belonged and their level of activity. Jennings and Stoker focus on the breadth of organizational involvement and sacrifice the depth.
The volunteer work measure utilized an open-ended question. After indicating whether they performed any volunteer work ‘apart from any work you do for pay,’ those saying yes were asked ‘what kind of volunteer work do you do?’

Findings:

Life-Cycle Pattern: Trust drops for those in their early to mid-20s compared with those still in their teens. Trust then starts to rise with age, climbing just as steadily for those in the late 20s and early 30s as it had dropped for those exiting their teens. Put differently, trust rebounds as young adults adapt to their new circumstances and establish new social relationships.

Inter-Generational Differences:

On average, G3 is less trusting than G2 during life-stages. G3, however, is at a particularly distrusting moment in their lives. Put differently, this may be a life-cycle effect.

G2 were involved in more organizations than G1 at a comparable age. That difference rests in part on much greater participation of G2 women in the professions and business. Conversely, G2 also outranks G1 with respect to neighborhood associations and sports groups and visibly trails G1 only with respect to fraternal organizations.

In terms of voluntary organization memberships, G2 holds up its end of the civic engagement stick fully as well as did G1. These findings here accord with age-related findings (e.g., Putnam, 2000, chapter 14) and those based on explicit careful divisions between early and late Baby Boomers, which find the early Boomers to be more civically inclined than the later ones (e.g., Bennett and Rademacher, 1997).

G2 in 1997 tends to be slightly less trusting than G1 in 1965, but substantially more organizationally involved. Overall, the social capital levels favor G2 when Jennings and Stoker hold education, income, marital status, and workforce participation constant.

Read the findings on pages 354 and 355 very carefully. In sum, members of G3 experienced substantially less ‘applied’ civic training in high school than did their parents. Even though gains were registered in some domains (athletic teams, and speech and debate clubs) the overall portrait is of less extracurricular involvement among today’s youth than among those of the boomer era. Although our evidence has concerned pre-adult involvement in social activities and organizations, it is fully consistent with the fears, and findings, of lessened civic involvement among recent cohorts of young adults.

The distinctively low levels of trust and engagement found for G3 can’t be traced to a generational difference in the success of parent–child transmission.

Life-cycle effects: In the aggregate G2 members increased their volunteering a bit as they aged from their mid-30s to around 50 years of age, as also expressed by an increase in the mean number of activities from 0.57 to 0.70. Although G3 trails G2 as of 1997, a breakdown by age shows that late adolescents essentially match their parents: 43% of the 16–20-year olds do volunteer work.

Strong findings for life-cycle effects: the volume and focus of volunteer work are mightily conditioned by life stage as well as by the opportunity structures presented by well-established institutions



There is a clear life-cycle dynamic at work in the link between one’s organizational experiences as a pre-adult and those that surface later on. The results provide near spectacular support for such effects. The seeds planted during the high school years germinate and only gradually bear fruit. As people move into the life situations of middle age that evoke or require civic engagement, they draw on the predispositions and skills set in place at an earlier time. Pre-adult experiences do eventually matter.

For voluntary activity is there a positive, statistically significant result; those with a history of volunteering are more trusting than would be otherwise expected on the basis of their personality and SES.

Trust is a stronger prerequisite for, than an outcome of, civic engagement.

Conclusion:

The Gen Xers are less engaged, less trusting, etc. than their parents and grandparents. Their parents (G2) were more engaged than their grandparents (G1)

While generational differences in social trust and civic engagement are stark, so too are those involving the life cycle.

There’s a decline in each form of civic engagement from late adolescence to early adulthood. Youth in high school have many opportunities to volunteer and join groups, and they have strong incentives to do so. Involvement drops dramatically after HS and only slowly climbs upwards again as middle age sets in.

There’s a parallel life cycle trend in social trust — with trust levels first falling with the transition from adolescence to adulthood, then climbing again in the late 20s and subsequently. There may even be a decline in the later years, but they are unable to use their evidence to distinguish period from life-cycle effects.

The parallel nature of these life-cycle trends encourages the expectation that trust and engagement are dynamically inter-related, but evidence on this point is decidedly mixed. It’s more plausible that SES is lurking behind both patterns.

Those aged 18–25 years today will manifest lower levels of social trust and civic engagement than their elders because they are at an unsettled point in their lives and because they are representatives of the low social capital Generation X (or Y). The two phenomena should not be conflated when interpreting age differences as they have very different implications for how both individuals and society will change as time moves on.

The effects of organizational involvement in high school on involvement later in life are delayed, emerging gradually and increasingly strongly as the individual approaches middle age.
The apparent effect of social trust on civic engagement also increases as individuals move from young adulthood to mid-life.

Hope for the future! It may be possible to reverse the decline in social capital. Involving adolescents in social organizations early on should have consequences for their civic engagement level later in life. But those consequences will not be immediate. They will take time, perhaps even decades, to be felt, as the erstwhile high school students wend their way through life.

There is heterogeneity in the determinants of civic engagement, a heterogeneity structured by age. What inspires civic engagement in early adulthood is not the same as what instigates it in mid-life, nor, perhaps, in the later years. There appears to be age-related variation in the extent to which individuals’ early organizational experiences come to play a role, and in the extent to which their dispositions to trust or distrust others are consequential

Social trust is a disposition that is quite malleable among young adults. It is at best weakly transmitted from parent to child, leaving the young adult quite open to other influences, good or bad. It is also quite unstable across the early years of adulthood. At the same time, the tendency to trust or distrust others appears to crystallize with age. Hence, efforts to nurture trusting dispositions will be fruitful if they are targeted at those, particularly young adults, whose dispositions are more in play.

There are both age-related and generational differences in the stability of organizational involvement. Compared to those from the Long Civic Generation (our G1), the Baby Boomers (our G2) move more frequently into and out of voluntary associations over time.

Sears (1990) Whither Political Socialization Research? The Question of Persistence

THE EARLY YEARS (of political socialization persistence research)
Greenstein, Hyman, Easton and Dennis etc. all emphasized the lasting effects of early experiences

CURRENT STATUS
in the 80s the discipline went through an era of stagflation... Sears argues that is on account of changing conventional wisdom; whereas before, early experiences were shown to have lasting effects, in the wake of instability of attitudes work, and more so by Searing and colleagues, who said the primacy principle had been overstated, CW moved to the effect of "children's political attitudes are not very strong and not very persistent" (73).
The psychological tradition bemoans the enthusiastic endorsement of the primacy principle as well, and most agree, "humans have the capacity to change across the entire life span" (p76, from Brim & Kagan 1980). Current conditions (like the economy) or technology are likely to sway opinions and change minds.
Evenso, during the ambush of political socialization effects, scholarly work was still being produced by Jennings and Markus, among others. They found political ideology to be stable, as well as racial prejudice.

The debate, then, is over whenther adults form opinions based upon their longstanding presidpositions, or upon their current informational environments (is their processing "data-driven" or "theory-driven"?).

PERSISTENCE:
if the debate is about the extent to which longstanding predispositions determine attitudes, it becomes a matter of early attitude/experience persistence.

I. Models of persistence
Three Viewpoints:
Persistence: early socialization is immune to change in later years (the revisionist perspective is less stubborn, but still takes a similar perspective).
Life cycle: at different points in our life, we are more suceptible to certain ideas.
Impressionable years: predispositions are always vulnerable to change, especially in light of high salient movements, or events.

II. Pressure to change versus resistance to change
attitude change results when the pressure outweighs the resistance. stability, then, relfects either strong resistance, or simply a lack of pressure. Thus change, or the lack of it, cannot be used as the sole index of the strength of the underlying disposition.

III. Symbolic pre-dispositions and Non-attitudes
dates back to Converse (!964). Converse found individuals to express non-attitudes, on account of teir inconsistent responses. Yet, "the question of persistence is largely moot for attitudes at the "non-attitude" [or what psychologists term] low ego-involvement end of this dimension, since attitudes are mainly extremely malleable. The question becomes interesting only for attitudes at the high ego-involvement end of this continuum" (79). high ego-involved attitudes are those that are conditions to particular symbols, like America, Blacks, Democrat, Communism (Sears calls them symbolic pre-dispositions). Thus the strength of the emotional attachment is key (79). But important as well is that symbolic predispositions:
-get the most attention form the media and in ordinary conversation
-reflect the most rife and controversial issues
-help people organize the ongoing flow of information (political and scial issues)

ASSESSING PERSISTENCE
Five general paradigms that assess persistence:
(1) Retrospective judgments
-memories predict attitudes in later life
(2) The "Structuring Principle"
presumed residues of early socialization influence attitudes toward new political events, candidate and issues
(3) Cohort Analysis
test attitudes for two cohorts at time one and two
(4) Longitudinal studies
estimate the stability of individuals' attitudes over time (Jennings and Neimi)
(5) Natural Experiments
pool results from several approaches (personal experiences, changes in social location, and poltiical events and communications).
-personal experiences:direct personal experiences, according to most psychological theories, ought to have a special potential for eroding the residues of preadult socialization. (not a lot of work on the issue, though--Jennings and Markus 1977 report on high school grads who subsequently went to vietnam, which found predispositions to be strong (er? than vietnam experience)). But for the most part, personal experiences are those such as tax hikes, or having children, and then those children go to school (thus self-interest may override predispositions). yet work by Sears finds self-interest to have remarkably little effect on policy attitudes and on voting, suggesting that adult's basic attitude are, most of teh time, unresponsive to their self-interest.
-changes in social location: when a person moves from one social environment to another, where the norms are contrary to priors, do attitudes shift? Newcomb et al (1967) found attitudes to express continuity across environments/social locations. Similar findings from more rigorous data found by Miller and Sears (1986).
-political events and communication: minimal effects model, supported

Although it seems that early experience and exposure is longstanding, Sears concludes that a combination of the persisenece and imporessionalbe-uears notes best describe the life course of poiticla and social attitudes that are most impportant. Yet it is still difficult to untangle if the persistence of predispositions (largely derived from early socialization) is on account of high resistance to change, or little pressure to change).

Sears & Funk (1999) Evidence of the Long-Term Persistence of Adults' Political Predispositions

Sears and Funk (1999) Evidence of the Long-Term Persistence of Adults' Political Predispositions

long term
large sample
longitudinal

Abstract: The persistence hypothesis holds that core political pre-dispositions tend to be highly stable through the life span. It has rarely been tested directly, given the scarcity of long-term large-sample longitudinal studies. We address it through the Terman longitudinal study, in which the party identification and ideology of 1,272 respondents were measured on four occasions between 1940-1977, from roughly age 30 to retirement age. These partisan attitudes were lightly stable over this long period, yielding continuity coefficients of about .80 between each measurement (separated by at least 10 years) and .65 for the full 37-year span. Examination of the trajectories of individual attitudes reveals that the most common pattern was constancy across time. A substantial minority changed in small but consistent ways, but changes form one partisan side to the other were not very common. Surprisingly, early-life racial attitudes ha a resurgent effect on partisan attitudes in the 1970s. There was evidence of increasing attitude crystallization through the life span, infusing core pre-dispositions with increasing psychological strength over time. Limitations of the study include the high intelligence of the respondents and the "steady" state of the party system through most of this period.

Our primary goal in this paper is to test empirically the stability of core political predispositions across the full adult lifespan.
*incorporates a persistence hypothesis: the attitudes persist from early adulthood through adulthood.

The Data:
mail questionnaires distributed 1940, 1950, 1960, 1977
N= 1,272 (had to respond to at least 2 questionnaires)
measures:
pid, ideology, etc.


General Pre-Dispositional Model-
attitudes on certain objects become crystallized; as these attitudes become more crystallized, these attitudes serves as a predisposition for evaluating new attitude objects (issues or political candidates).
-even "poorly crystallized attitudes may be quite stable if they confront little challenges" (2).
-crystallization is not necessarily incremental. there can be periodic leaps forward triggered by information-rich environments or other external prodding.
-IMPORTANT!! "Not all attitudes fit the predisposition description. If persistence depends on the intensity and direction of information flow, it is likely to vary across attitude domains as well, because they vary a great deal in the amount of public attention they receive. This is why party id is more stable--its more salient. other issue domains exert less attitude stability, arguably because they suffer from low political salience, or they are complex (Feldman and Zaller 1992).
-priming plays a role; attitudes need to be primed to be activated, kind of? "The priming variant of the persistence hypothesis suggests that predispositions can change as old issues drop off the political agenda and new issues become more salient"


Findings:
For both PID and ideology, the most common pattern was to hold the same position at all three time points (3?). 59% were perfectly stable in PID and another 6% had returned to their original decision by the end. Thus 65% ended up where they started. 42% for ideology were at the same point at al three points; 12% defected for a short time, but the longitudinal study allows us to see that 54% wound up where they started from. "So the most common individual trajectory for either party identification or ideology was to hold the same basic preference at both the beginning and the end of adulthood, not withstanding the fact that a few had some sojourn elsewhere" (13).
The most movement came from those in the middle, moving from moderate conserve (lib) to moderate lib (conservative).

However, this describes change. it does not explain it.

AGENDA SETTING/PRIMING EFFECTS: What explains change can somewhat be attributed to the political agenda. For example, racial attitudes were measured in 1940; but they don’t have any PID or ideological predictive power until the 1977 survey. the women's movement questions as well, though smaller increase. "The effect of attitudes toward blacks also dropped steadily from 1940-1960, in a period of relative neglect of racial issues. but their effect surged considerably in 1977, and actually became somewhat more predictive of L/R orientation that in 1940, when originally measured.

AGE EFFECTS: Stability does indeed rise with age (18). as does attitude consistency (PID and ideology).

KNOWLEDGE LEVELS: those with more education (some college) are more likely to have stable attitudes (.71) than high school grads (.64). But these authors don’t make any confirming conclusions on the effects of education---the jury is still out.

Where does this leave us?
"It is noteworthy that their early-acquired political pre-dispositions show particularly high levels of persistence through their full adult life spans. The findings therefore provide a look at an important segment of the public over an unusually long and politically interesting period in American history" (21).

Conclusions:
As adults their party OD and political ideologies were remarkably stable over four widely spaced intervals between 1940 and 1977.

Changes did occur, but they were usually in a consistent direction. i.e. in PID 32% changed in consistent direction, as opposed to the 8% that did not change in a consistent direction. for ideology, 41% changed in a consistent direction; 17% were inconsistent.

the change is real and systematic, from 1940, 50, 60 to 77.

Shifts might be occurring on account of issue salience, as the priming hypothesis states. "Apparent attitude changes might therefore reflect changes in issue salience rather than change in the predispositions themselves, reflecting, in Asch's (1948) terms, "changes in the attitude object," rather than "changes in attitude" (23).

The long-term impact of early socialization is therefore not a psychological given, but depends on several facilitating conditions that are themselves much influenced by the ongoing political environment. One is that early-life experiences must yield crystallized attitudes, which should be most likely when exogenous events stimulate high levels of relevant communication. This occurs routinely for partisanship as part of the election cycle. Extraordinarily events such as the Kennedy assassination, the Watergate scandal, the protests of the 1960s, or the GD have also left lasting traces on both the memory and political attitudes of entire generations (23).

social environment matters. frequent reinforcement is important (as indicated by election cycle reinforcement of PID).
information flows matter. "Elites also need to frame political issues such that ordinary citizens can link them cognitively to relevant pre-dispositions (Kinder and Sanders 1996; Sears and Huddy 1992). Of course, alternate frames may evoke different pre-dispositions, so elites must compete to secure the most favorable framing. Such competition over the public agenda may advantage the partisan camp that succeeds in focusing attention on issues it owns" (Petrocik 1996).

Mettler & Welch (2004) Civic Generation

The civic generation came of age during the Depression and WWII. They are a highly civically engage generation--yet why? In the wake of a macro social capital decline, in order to understand why its declining we need to understand why the "greatest generation" was so great. Mettler and Welch suggest a policy feedback theory--one that combines the macro level and micro level observations (historical institutionism and behavioralism)--can lend an explanation to why that particular generation was and is so great.

Policy feedback effects:
Policies themselves shape subsequent political activity. Thus policies have the potential to "make" citizens... citizens that would have refrained from political activity, had a policy that affected them not been instated, now have motive to participate.

Paul Pierson heads this theory, in political science. policies "make" citizens in two ways:
(1) resource effects: policies give citizens resources that might not have had without the policy
(2) interpretive effects: policies also convey meaning; for example, the GI Bill was an indicator to veterans that the government wanted to reward them for their service with free education. Similarly, welfare policy somewhat demeans recipients, making their feel less than worthy of the "handouts" and a number of theories suggest this is one reason welfare recipients are less likely to be political engaged/active.

Mettler takes Pierson's resource effects and interpretive effects a bit farther to suggest the resource effects enables our capacities (skills etc.), and intrepretive effects have a psychological effect (see the above example about welfare, I gave).

Research Design:
Case Study: GI Bill--utilized by over 50% of veterans.
Three successive Time periods:
1950-1964
1964-1979
1980-1998

Hypotheses:
the GI Bill with have an "interpretive" effect for the 1950-1964 respondents; these respondents' memories of the benefits from government are the most salient. thus appreciating the GI Bill, and understanding it is from government, this generation of respondents are more likely to be active on account of that.
the later generations are more likely to be political active on account of "resource" effects; now well into their years, the GI Bill enabled them to get an education--it is this education that has brought them resources tantamount to SES resources which lead to high levels of political activity.

Findings:
confirmed; interpretive effects lead GI Bill recipients to be politically active from 1950-1964; then those who went on to use the GI Bill for higher education maintained political activity (from 1964-1998) on account of resource effects.