we've talked a lot about factors that go into how people

develop their opinions on government and politics.

Your family, your friends, your demographic characteristics,

like your race, your gender,

they all contribute to your views.

In this video, I wanna talk about another set of factors

that influence a person's political views,

and that's political events.

And political events include not just elections or debates

or laws, but things like terrorist attacks,

or international incidents, or economic recessions.

These are external events that shape a person's beliefs,

either in the short-term or maybe even

for the rest of their lives.

So what are some examples

of how political events influence ideology?

Some events can change a person's party identification

or how strongly they identify with a party.

For example, researchers have found that people

who lost family members in the September 11th

terrorist attacks became more politically active

and have identified more strongly

with the Republican party since then.

Sometimes events can influence a person's attitudes

toward government and the political process as a whole.

And here we're not talking about which party a person

favors, but rather their ideas about government itself,

like is the government trustworthy?

Does my vote really count?

One example of this is the lasting influence

of the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal

on public trust in government.

You can see in this graph by the Pew Research Center

that since polls started asking Americans whether they trust

Washington to do what is right always or most of the time,

trust peaked in the early Johnson administration,

then crashed in the mid-1960s and 1970s

and has never really recovered since.

So events that happened more than 50 years ago have left

a mark on public trust in government that hasn't gone away.

But not all political events have

such a lasting effect on beliefs.

Some events influence opinions for just a short term,

like international events that influence

Americans' attitudes towards other countries.

For example, you can see in this poll data done by Gallup,

that the public's favorable opinion about Russia has changed

a great deal over the last 20 years,

with revelations about Russian hacking coming in 2015

leading to a sharp decline in favorable opinions.

The last thing I wanna note here is that researchers

have discovered that political events that happen

when someone is in their formative age, or the age

from about 18 to 24, when people are just getting out

on their own and starting to form an independent identity.

Events that happen then are more likely to have long lasting

effects on a person's political beliefs and behaviors.

The great recession in 2008 had a strong effect on people

in the millennial generation, many of whom were just getting

out into the workforce when it hit.

Studies have shown that this had an especially

strong influence on their ideas about government

and money compared to other generations.

So events can have both short and long-term effects

on people's political beliefs, not just about whether

they lean more liberal or conservative,

but also about how they think about government itself.

And those effects may be felt more strongly depending

on what stage a person is in their life

or how deeply an event impacts them personally.