76 "Presenting" the Past
with the inquiry about the etiology of the system or the aggregate of the
individual's political behavior.^1 The traditional concern of researchers has
been the political development of the young to see how youngsters gain
their political orientations.
There have been two major categories of concern in political socializa-
tion research: system-level effects, which demonstrate the relevance of
socialization for the operations of political systems, and individual-level
concerns, which illustrate the processes by which individuals are politi-
cally socialized. The latter concentration is the best-developed area, which
concerns itself with Greenstein's questions "who learns what from whom
under what circumstances with what effects?" Several different theories,
such as the systems-persistence theory of Easton and Dennis, psychoana-
lytic theory, learning theory, and cognitive-development theory, have pro-
vided the guidance in political socialization research.^2
Among these, the psycho-cultural approach regards political socializa-
tion as a simple process and assumes that significant socialization experi-
ences take place early in life, that these experiences are neither intended
to have political effects nor are the political effects recognized, and that
the socialization process is a unidirectional one in which the basic family
experiences have a significant impact upon the secondary structures of
politics. If we expand this early and latent political socialization, according
to Almond and Verba, we may find that the sources of political attitudes
include early socialization experiences, late socialization experiences dur-
ing adolescence, and postsocialization experiences as an adult that are
both political and nonpolitical and intended and unintended to have an
effect on political attitudes.^3
Pointing out the dearth of research on adult socialization, Sigel and
Hoskin map out a theoretical spectrum with a "persistence-beyond-
childhood" model on the one end, which stresses the persistence of early
socialization. On the other end of the spectrum is a "constant change"
model, which assumes that the political orientations of a person are mal-
leable throughout life if appropriate stimuli to change is given. The inter-
mediate "generations" model specifies that "events and experiences will
be interpreted differentially among age cohorts who share internal con-
sistency in terms of educational trends, age at which political events took
place, and subsequent peer influence in response to those events."^4 Even
these models focus only on the changes in the individual and in the society
that affect people's political orientations or actions or both. This narrow
concentration on the attitude and actions toward politics and political insti-
tutions with an emphasis on children's socialization may not pay enough
dividends in political-socialization research today. This is because social-
ization agents have multiplied in the modern world, which is preoccupied
not with political attitudes or values but with political identities.
A word about political-socialization agents and the preponderance of
identity politics in today's world is in order here. Two different processes