Families and the Politics of Identity : The Case of Catalonia
Although a considerable amount of research exists regarding the transfer of political orientations within the family, little systematic attention has been devoted to studying the transmission of national identities in contexts where such identities constitute a basic cleavage of political competition. This paper examines the transfer of national identities in the Spanish region of Catalonia, where contending identities, along with left-right ideology, give shape to a distinctive regional party system. Using data from a region-wide household panel survey conducted from 2002 onward, we analyze the reproduction of national identities as observed in parent-child pairs and triads, and compare it to the transmission of other political orientations, including left-right self-locations and party preference. The direct transmission model is tested against the rival hypothesis of indirect transmission via social characteristics such as region of origin and use of language. We also examine variations in parent-child correspondence as a function of levels of agreement between parents, same-sex and cross-sex combinations of parents and their children, and the ethnic composition of neighborhoods