Political socialization and policy evaluation: The case of youth employment and training program

Abstract

The detection and assessment of side effects or unintended consequences in policy evaluation are seldom conducted in other than a casual manner. This paper investigates the unintended impact of an employment and training program on the political orientations of participants. Applying a political socialization framework, this study compared the postprogram attitudes toward citizenship of 286 CETA-eligible youth with a randomly assigned control group of 161 youth. Entering minority status and gender as factors and preprogram attitudes toward citizenship as the covariate, the ANCOVA results indicate that political orientations of experimentais, especially program completers, are significantly higher compared with control group members.