UC Riverside

How do families produce partisans? This three-paper dissertation argues that the household is a primary generative site of affective polarization, transmitting not just party identification but partisan feeling across generations through mechanisms that are largely unintentional, emotionally driven, and rooted in the ordinary behavior of parents. The three papers examine this process in sequence, moving from the historical fact of transmission to the governing philosophy that connects parenting values to policy preferences, to the real-time emotional behaviors through which transmission occurs.