Marital Status, Sex and the Formation of Political Attitudes in Adult Life

Abstract

Little is known about the effect of adult experience on political attitude formation. Recent work on political and social change asks us to take on trust a quantum leap from personality and childhood experience to adult political preference and neither accounts for rapid political change nor acknowledges the variety of experience which may produce a spurious ‘time-lag’ effect in political response to change. In this study the attitudes of divorced and separated people, a social group recently formed out of the existing adult population, are compared with those of persons without those attributes. The results show that a satisfactory theoretical model of political attitude formation must incorporate adult experience as an important determinant and distinguish carefully between social conditions in general and the specific social experience of individuals.