Get Ready for the Wave

Title: The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World Author: Shaun Rein US$ 24.95 224 pages, hardback Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2012     

Fengdu’s Changing Scenery

THE town of Fengdu sits on the banks of the Yangtze River, about 150 km downstream from Chongqing.Seen from the opposite bank,the town is an island of white highrises,oddly without the suburban sprawl usually associated with these kinds of urban areas. Fengdu is one of the counties that have     

Coffee in Paradise

TO most people, Shangri-La, a place name introduced to the world by British author James Hilton in his novel Lost Horizon, represents paradise, longevity, and a kind of natural purity rarely found in this day and age. It thus seems fitting that Shangri-La Farms, a natural products company, takes its name from the legendary city in northwestern Yunnan, from where it also sources most of its produce. The company was founded by the Malik family. The epitome of globalization, their origins lie in the U.S. and Pakistan     

Political socialization,political gender gaps and the intergenerational transmission of left-right ideology

While left and right are the main terms to distinguish political views in Western Europe, the family socialization of citizens has mainly been studied in terms of partisan preferences rather than identification with these ideological blocks. Therefore, this study investigates the intergenerational transmission of left-right ideological positions in two European multiparty systems. To investigate expectations regarding gendered patterns in political socialization, ideological transmission between mothers, fathers, daughters and sons are analyzed, making use of German and Swiss household data. The results underline the relevance of the family in the transmission of political ideology in multiparty systems, showing high contemporary parent–child concordance in ideological positioning in line with classic work in political socialization. Moreover, the study demonstrates how the gender-generation gap in political ideology is consequential for this process. Young women consistently place themselves on the left of men across all combinations of parental ideology, which indicates that the gender-generation gap trumps other gendered patterns in intergenerational transmission. Consequently, daughters are less likely than sons to take over their parents’ rightist positions, while parent–son transmission is equally large on the left and the right. This also means that left-leaning parents have a general advantage over right-leaning parents in having their ideological identification reproduced by their daughters. The study highlights the importance of differentiating between the transmission of left- and right-wing ideology in political socialization processes. Moreover, it demonstrates that the distinction by offspring gender is imperative when studying the intergenerational transmission of traits that display gender differences within and between parental and offspring generations. The findings point at the active role of especially female offspring in the political socialization process, as they seem to be more strongly impacted by influences outside the family that sustain generational processes of further gender realignment.