Country of Origin Matters: Explaining Immigrants' Political Participation through a Socialization Perspective

This paper systematically analyzes how individual-level, country-level, and region-level variables affect immigrants’ political behavior. We propose an “original imprint” theory, arguing that immigrants’ country of origin influences their political participation through the political socialization process. More specifically, we expect to see differences between immigrants who come to the United States at an older age and those who come at a younger age. We argue that an immigrant’s country of origin has a substantially stronger impact on older immigrants because they are socialized in their home country; country of origin affects the younger immigrants less because younger immigrants are socialized in the United States. To test our theory, we use the Current Population Survey 2008 civic engagement supplement data, which contains interviews with over six thousand immigrants from over a hundred countries. Using a Bayesian hierarchical model, we find strong support for our original imprint theory. Our theory and findings have implications for the literatures on immigration politics, political participation, and socialization.