Political socialization is the process by which individuals internalize and develop their political values, ideas, attitudes, and perceptions via the agents of socialization. Political socialization occurs through processes of socialization that can be structured as primary and secondary socialization. Primary socialization agents include the family, whereas secondary socialization refers to agents outside the family. Agents such as family, education, media, and peers influence the most in establishing varying political lenses that frame one's perception of political values, ideas, and attitudes. These perceptions, in turn, shape and define individuals' definitions of who they are and how they should behave in the political and economic institutions in which they live. This learning process shapes perceptions that influence which norms, behaviors, values, opinions, morals, and priorities will ultimately shape their political ideology: it is a "study of the developmental processes by which people of all ages and adolescents acquire political cognition, attitudes, and behaviors." These agents expose individuals through varying degrees of influence, inducing them into the political culture and their orientations towards political objects. Throughout a lifetime, these experiences influence your political identity and shape your political outlook.  

Agents of socialization, sometimes called institutions, work together to influence and shape people's political norms and values. In the case of political socialization, the most significant agents include, but are not limited to, families, media, education, and peers. Other agents include religion, the state, and community. These agents shape your understanding of politics by exposing you to political ideas, values, and behaviors.

Across the decades, literature has heavily emphasized that the agent of the family is the most influential, with literature suggesting that family and the transmission of attitudes from parent to child are the most prominent agents of socialization. This claim has found especially strong support for the transmission of voting behaviour, partisanship and religious attitudes. Especially in contexts of high politization and homogeneity in political views, transmissions are argued to be higher. Literature examines how aspects of family structures and dynamics change the varying influence of the offspring's values as a function of the distribution of their parent's attitudes. Families perpetuate values that support political authorities and can heavily contribute to children's initial political ideological views, or party affiliations. Literature suggest that the transmission of intergenerational political attitudes shows a strong lineage concerning their parents and siblings. Families have an effect on "political knowledge, identification, efficacy, and participation", depending on variables such as "family demographics, life cycle, parenting style, parental level of political cynicism", interest and politization, and "frequency of political discussions", as well as the saliency of the issues that are being discussed.

The household distributes civic resources unequally, which produces lasting differences in how much people take part in politics.

The resource model of participation holds that political activity depends on time, money and civic skills, which are spread unevenly across households. Civic skills are acquired early, at home and in the settings a family's position makes accessible, so household conditions shape participation before adulthood.

Longitudinal evidence connects childhood economic conditions to later turnout. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, Weißenfels linked first-time voters aged 18 to 25 to information about their parents and followed turnout across four federal elections between 2009 and 2021, defining childhood poverty as living below the at-risk-of-poverty line before age 12. Turnout was lower among those who grew up poor, and each additional year of poverty deepened the effect. About 47 percent of respondents raised in poverty by low-educated parents voted, compared with about 80 percent of never-poor respondents with highly educated parents. Strong parental interest in politics removed this gap. Poverty that began early and persisted mattered most, and leaving poverty in adulthood did not raise participation.

The quality of family interaction shapes these effects. Using the 1996 National Household Education Survey, McIntosh, Hart and Youniss found that the frequency of parent–adolescent political discussion predicted news attention, political knowledge, communication skill and community service, and that the knowledge gain was larger when parents were themselves politically informed. Parental income, employment and homeownership had little direct effect on most outcomes, which indicates that economic resources work mainly through discussion and household stability.

Transmission within the family works relationally, not automatically. Drawing on the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Study, Zuckerman, Dasovic and Fitzgerald showed that partisanship is reproduced through everyday interaction and negotiation, so one household can produce children with different orientations depending on their relationship with each parent.