Compressed Modernity in Taiwan: Fathers as the Sole Influencers on National Identity

Many studies point to the importance of parents in shaping the ethnic and/or political identity of their offspring. However, there is a lack of consensus on the pattern of influence of fathers and mothers in the process of political socialization. While studies in the United States and Japan show the mother to be more influential than the father in transferring political identity to children, studies in China show that both parents have equal importance. We suggest that these differences are owing to different trajectories of modernization. Using Taiwan as a case study and drawing on the theory of compressed modernity, we demonstrate how compressed modernization generates a different shift in the pattern of parental political socialization. We show that before Taiwan's experience of compressed modernization, both parents influenced children's sense of Taiwanese-ness, while only the father was influential after compressed modernization. We also show the significance of a macro-level perspective for explaining differences in the micro-level socialization perspective.