The role of elections in the intergenerational transmission of identity

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Jose Maycas-Sardi, PhD candidate at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

How do families transmit identity, and how do elections shape this process? Using the universe of birth records between 1996 and 2024 in Euskadi and Navarra (approximately 604,000 newborns), I study how parents signal and transmit identity through name choices. I construct a Basque Name Index measuring how distinctively Basque each name is and show three results. First, the intergenerational elasticity of naming identity flattens for parents who carry an inherited identity marker: families with distinctively Basque surnames transmit less intensely through first names, as the surname already signals group membership. Second, election outcomes––not demographic composition––serve as informational devices for second-order beliefs and moderate vertical transmission. Third, institutions matter. The 2009 regional elections in Euskadi provide a setting in which the expectations of institutional stability shifted. For the first time since the democratic transition, a non-nationalist party governed the Lehendakaritza. I use this case to show that in places where families had previously relied on community socialization, Basque parents increased their transmission intensity. These findings show that cultural transmission is not static, on the contrary, it responds to the social and political environment and depends on the initial descent-based attributes of families.

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