ABSTRACTThe inheritance and continuity of party identification is usually traced to the predominant influence of parental political socialization. This paper applies multivariate analysis to Australian and British data to examine (1) the relative importance of parents' partisanship and social milieu on the respondent's own partisanship and (2) the influence of parentsapos; partisanship on the preferences of the respondent in later life. The analysis shows that, in both countries, the social milieu of the family has little or no effect on the preferences of the children and it is the partisanship of the parents that is the dominant factor. In addition, we show that the influence of parents' partisanship is limited to early adulthood and to the first partisanship of the child; it has little or no direct influence on the respondent's subsequent electoral behaviour.