Political reproduction in Russia: parental communist party membership and offspring voting behaviour

Intergenerational transmission processes shape political behaviour. However, it is unclear if parental party affiliation during communism is associated with children’s voting behavior during the post-Soviet era. I use the case of post-Soviet elections in 2000, 2003, and 2004 in Russia to understand how family political party membership during the Soviet Union period is associated with children’s voting and political behaviour after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Leveraging insights from the national representative survey, I find that parental membership in the Communist Party before 1991 is associated with greater voter turnout among young Russian adults. I further show that these relationships persist only if a respondent’s family did not experience an economic shock (job loss or salary reduction) during economic instability in the 1990s. These results suggest the family’s pivotal role in the reproduction of political behaviours in the post-Soviet Russia, a context distinguished by wide political and economic transformations.