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Has social reproduction through families preserved unequal political participation amongst the working class in post-industrial society? This article builds on both political and sociological traditions to consider the family as a tenacious social structure that reproduces political participation from one generation to the next. In order to answer this empirically, the study uses a longitudinal panel data of political behaviour across three biological generations in the United States (1965–1997). The findings show that respondents who grew up in working-class families are less likely to vote as adults regardless of whether they have working-class occupations or not. The transmission of un-equal participation is partially mediated by the voting behaviour of the parent who models this behaviour to their children. The study also shows that the second generation of respondents transmits low political participation to their offspring in the third generation. This study implies that occupational structures of a past industrial society are still politically relevant and that inequalities in political participation remain a legacy amongst the biological descendants of working-class families from the 1960s. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2022.2044220. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five decades ago, Inglehart for the first time described and explained an unprecedented transformation of political cultures in advanced industrial societies, which he called the "silent revolution." It was characterized by the emergence in those countries of postmaterialist values as the result of a sustained period of economic growth, and the profound impact of those values on people's political attitudes and behavior. As China has experienced extraordinary economic growth in the past several decades, has such a "silent revolution" happened there? The answer to this question has been far from complete or clear. Using three longitudinal, cross-sectional national surveys, we find that while the current level of postmaterialist values in China remains relatively low, such values have flourished among younger people, and those values do shape political attitudes and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK government's efforts to facilitate shale gas exploration have been matched by a surge of public opposition. The latter has manifested in a broad spectrum of activities in which local communities have "watched fracking"—meaning they have observed, protested, and filmed outside the drilling site, often taking note of when the pumps start and stop. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in northwest England, I analyze residents' various "watching" activities as one dynamic through which they sought to mediate situated modes of sociopolitical erasure. Watching fracking was a form of directly participating in public matters, compensating the watchers for the state's perceived failures and those of corporate models of community engagement. It also helped members of the anti‐fracking community distance themselves from the state and their own feelings of alienation. By thus highlighting how disappointment with state formations interacts with an activist subjectivity, anthropologists can deepen our understanding of the changing relationship between state and society. [fracking, public engagement, state, citizen science, protest, extractive industry, Lancashire, United Kingdom] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]