Parental Influence on Adolescents’ Political
Participation
A Comparison of Belgian, Canadian and Romanian Survey Data
Ellen Quintelier (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
Marc Hooghe (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
Gabriel Badescu (Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca, Romenia)
Paper presented at the
International Conference on
Political Socialisation
Örebro Universitet
Örebro (Sweden)
October 8-10, 2007
1
Abstract
The intergenerational transmission of political attitudes and behaviors is thought to be
one of the main forms of political socialization. The political interest of children and
adolescents largely mirrors the interest patterns and ideological preferences of their
parents. There is less knowledge, however, about the causal mechanism that might be
at work: 1) do parents actively promote value patterns among their children, 2) do
they function as a role model, or 3) do they simply transmit their socio-economic
status to their children, with as a result a resemblance in accompanying political
attitudes? In this article we investigate this causal mechanism by relying on the results
of the Comparative Youth Survey which was conducted in Belgium, Canada and
Romania. Our results suggest that the discussion and the interaction within the family
have a strong effect on adolescents’ participation patterns. Families with a higher
socio-economic status are also more effective in transmitting their attitudinal and
behavioral patterns toward the next generation. We also find more conclusive
evidence for intergenerational transmission in stable democracies like Belgium or
Canada, than in a newly emerging democracy like Romania.
2
Introduction
The family is often considered as the primary socialization context for young people,
also with regard to political attitudes and behaviors. Usually, young children will
experience their first political discussions or their first political activities together with
their parents and/or siblings. In the classical literature on political socialization, the
family was considered as the most important determinant of young people’s attitudes
and behaviors (Davies, 1965; Langton, 1969; Dawson & Prewitt, 1969;
Bronfenbrenner, 1979).
Within the family, young people learn to fulfill their accepted social, gender and
political roles (Langton, 1969). As such, the intergenerational transmission of political
attitudes and behaviors was often portrayed as a mechanism to ensure social stability,
leading to a strong resemblance of attitudes between subsequent cohorts (Sapiro,
2004; Hooghe & Wilkenfeld 2007). In general, young people indeed tend to share the
political preferences and the beliefs of their parents, and the correlation between the
attitudes of parents and their offspring is usually quite strong (Jennings & Niemi,
1968; Tedin, 1974). Although there is widespread anecdotal evidence about the
rebellion of adolescents against the value patterns of their parents, by no means this
can be considered as a general pattern (Hyman, 1959; Jennings et al., 1968:171;
Niemi, Ross, & Alexander, 1978).
In the more recent literature on political socialization, however, other socializing
agents have received more attention. Various authors have highlighted the importance
of school experiences, the media, the peer group and other socialization experiences
(Galston, 2001; Sapiro, 2004). This shift in attention clearly has had a number of
3
policy consequences. E.g., in various countries and education systems, attention for
civic education efforts has been re-invigorated as a result of studies showing a
significant impact of at least some forms of civic education (Niemi & Junn, 1998).
Partly as a result of this increased focus on civic education and other socialization
contexts, the intergenerational transmission of political attitudes has received less
attention in the recent literature on political socialization (Stoker & Jennings, 1995;
Niemi & Hepburn, 1995; Petrie, 2004; Sapiro, 2004; Torney-Purta, Barber &
Wilkenfeld, 2007).
In this article we want to investigate whether the study of political socialization within
the family indeed has become obsolete. Child-rearing patterns clearly have changed
dramatically since the 1950s and in contemporary societies few parents have the
explicit goal to influence the political preferences of their children (Torney-Purta
2004). We also want to establish, however, what is the causal mechanism that could
explain the intergenerational transmission of political attitudes and behaviors. In the
literature, at least three possible mechanisms are suggested. First, parents could have a
direct impact on the attitudes of their children, by promoting some values and
discouraging the development of others. Second, we might also observe a network
effect. If parents are involved in voluntary associations or political parties themselves,
their children are more likely to be exposed to some mobilization effort by these
organizations. Third, it could be argued that the correlation between the value patterns
of parents and children is largely spurious. Since parents and children tend to share
the same socio-economic status, it is almost self-evident that both generations will
tend to develop the political attitudes and behaviors that are congruent with that
specific status.
4
In the remainder of this article, we want to ascertain which one of these three
suggested causal mechanisms has the strongest potential to explain the occurrence of
political similarities between parents and their children. Our current analysis builds on
earlier studies in two distinct ways. First, we use current (i.e., 2006) data to ascertain
whether parental influence is indeed still as strong as it was shown in the studies of
half a century ago. Second, we use comparative data, in order to detect the possible
impact of various social settings.
In the remainder of this article, we first give an overview of the literature on the
intergenerational transmission of political participation patterns. Subsequently we
present our data and methods, before we proceed with the analysis of the causal
mechanism that might be responsible for the observed correlation. We close with
some observations on the causes and consequences of the intergenerational
transmission of participation patterns in various social settings.
The influence of parents
Parents play an important role in the political socialization of their children (Hyman,
1959; Jennings et al., 1968; Jennings, Stoker, & Bowers, 2001). The impact of parents
has been demonstrated for quite some attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. First,
parents transmit political knowledge, awareness, interest, norms and values to their
children (Jaros, 1973; Langton, 1969; Valentino & Sears, 1998). While in some
families, political discussion will occur quite frequently, in other families political
topics tend to be avoided. Parents clearly stimulate the willingness and ability to
5
acquire information (John, Halpern, & Morris, 2002; Eveland & Scheufele, 2000).
Although Hess and Torney (1967) argue that the family is only ‘one of several
socializing agents and institutions’, research has demonstrated that the family can
have, and still has, a large impact on the political attitudes of children (Hyman, 1959;
Jennings et al., 2001). A general expectation is that the socializing impact of parents is
strongest at an early age, and it will tend to diminish as children grow older. At that
moment, other political socialization agents, like schools, peer groups or voluntary
associations, start to exert more influence on the value patterns of adolescents (Niemi
et al., 1978; Plutzer, 2002; Rosenstone & Hansen, 2003).
The impact of intergenerational transmission becomes especially salient in conditions
of rapid social change. While this mechanism usually can be seen as a source of social
stability, we do expect strong discontinuities between age cohorts, e.g., as a result of
structural changes within a society that can function as generation-defining events.
Niemi and Hepburn (1995) argue that the transmission of democratic values between
generations is not self-evident in new democracies: whereas in stable democracies,
(democratic) political socialization through school and family can be readily assumed,
this transfer is not evident in emerging democracies (Torney-Purta, Barber &
Richardson, 2004). Sapiro (2004) also stresses the need for comparative research,
because different contexts might lead to different effects of political socialization.
The intergenerational transmission of attitudes can be quite direct, as adolescents, e.g.,
acquire the same party identification as their parents. As already stated in the late
1950s (Hyman, 1959; Jennings et al., 1968), families are successful in transmitting
attitudes as partisanship (Hess & Torney, 1967; Jennings et al., 1968), party
identification (Banks & Roker, 1994), voting (Jennings & Niemi, 1981) and voting
6
preferences (Banks et al., 1994; Westholm & Niemi, 1992), etc. The transmission can
also function in a more indirect manner: specific patterns of decision-making within
the family and ways of interacting with the outside world will have an impact on
one’s political attitudes (Jaros, 1973). The family context offers the first experience
with authority of young people and in extremely negative cases, this might lead to
feelings of ethnocentrism, guilt and hostility (Langton, 1969). If parents are
democratic, young children are also more likely to become democratic-minded and
they will more easily adopt democratic decision-making procedures. It can be
expected that in this manner, families have an impact on levels of generalized trust
(Dalton, 1980) and civic participation (Chan & Elder, 2001; Hultsman, 1993). It has
also been demonstrated that the family context has an important effect on the
transmission of attitudes as civic tolerance (Dalton, 1980) or ethnocentrism (Langton,
1969).
The observed similarity in the political value patterns of older and younger
generations within a family, however, does not yet imply the occurrence of a direct
socialization effect. Several authors have argued that parents mainly transmit their
socio-economic status and class position to their children (Beck & Jennings, 1982:9697; John et al., 2002; Coleman et al., 1966; Chan et al., 2001; John, 2005). Parents
and children share “the same cultural, social, and class milieu” (Dalton, 1980:421).
Generally it has been argued that people with a similar socio-economic status will
tend to share similar political opinions. Since in most cases children will have a
similar class background as their parents, we expect parents and children to have
similar attitudes towards politics (Tedin, 1974). The home environment also
influences media use patterns of young people: parents decide if and which newspaper
they buy and often they also decide to watch the television news (or not) (Tedin,
7
1974). This media consumption pattern, too, might influences young people’s
attitudes towards politics in an indirect manner (Putnam, 2000; Hooghe, 2002).
Parents’ influence on political participation
While most socialization studies tend to focus on the transmission of political
attitudes, there is equally strong evidence about the intergenerational transmission of
political behavior patterns. For political behavior too, we can assume the
characteristics of young people are heavily influenced by the life-style and the
decisions of their parent: “The politically richer the home environment, the more
likely an adult is to undertake some political activity other than voting” (Verba,
Burns, & Schlozman, 2003:9). With regard to behavior too, it is possible to
distinguish direct and indirect causal mechanisms (Fridkin, Kenney & Crittenden,
2006). Direct influence can occur as a result of parents providing information to their
children (John et al., 2002), of talking in a positive and encouraging manner about
politics with their children (McDevitt & Chaffee, 2002), or by explicitly stimulating
them to participate politically (Plutzer, 2002).
Indirect influences have also been documented in the literature. Children will be more
likely to participate in civic and political life if their parents tend to participate in
elections (Plutzer, 2002; Martikainen, Martikainen, & Wass, 2005), in electoral
campaigns (Roker, Player, & Coleman, 1999), participate in politics in general
(Plutzer, 2002; McFarland & Thomas, 2006; Flanagan et al., 1998; Dawson &
Prewitt, 1969) or if they are actively engaged in voluntary activities (Chan et al.,
8
2001). We can refer to this as an indirect effect since the participation of the parents
self-evidently does not have the intention to influence the behavior pattern of their
children. A more likely explanation is that parents function as a political or social role
model for their children, who pick up the habit of playing an active social role (Hess
& Torney, 1967; Roker et al., 1999; McFarland et al., 2006). As Chan and Elder
(2001:26) summarize it: “Through their own involvement, parents socialize children
into a civic culture […] and encourage participation in youth groups”.
It has been suggested that a stable home environment, too, might have a positive
effect on the willingness of young people to participate in political life. Davies (1965)
and Clarke (1973) already argued that the (long-term) absence of one of the parents
could lead to lower levels of political awareness, and although this insight might have
become outdated in contemporary society, more recent studies still suggest that
political discussions occur less frequently in single-parent families (Gimpel, Lay, &
Schuknecht, 2003). Marriage or another stable long-term commitment generally
increases stability in one’s life: it enhances the likelihood of integration into the
community and the development of stable social networks (Stoker et al., 1995, see
however also Dolan, 1995). When children grow up in a stable home environment,
they probably will move less often which would facilitate their integration in local
civic networks. It is also more likely that they will have access to two political role
models in stead of one and this too might make them more likely to participate (Hess
& Torney, 1967; Gimpel, Lay, & Schuknecht, 2003; Sandell & Plutzer, 2005; Verba,
Schlozman, & Brady, 1995; Rosenstone & Hansen, 2003). Stable home environment
in our study refers to the fact that children grow up with two parents, whether these
are married or have any other form of stable relationship (Sigel, 1995). Research
9
suggests that marriage can increase the intensity of political participation of the
spouses (Stoker et al., 1995; Highton & Wolfinger, 2001; Zuckerman, Dasović &
Fitzgerald, 2007), while the experience of divorce can have a depressing effect on the
likelihood of voter turnout (Sandell et al., 2005).
Not all families, however, will be equally effective in transmitting their values. Niemi,
Ross and Alexander (1978) found a stronger parent-child similarity in attitudes among
college students than among non-students. They explain this finding by arguing that
parents have a stronger influence on the attitudes of their children in a family with a
high socio-economic status than in families with a relatively low socio-economic
status (Plutzer, 2002). The general idea behind this explanation is that high-status
families invest more effort in transmitting attitudes to their children, with as a
consequence that they are indeed more effective in transmitting political value
patterns toward their children.
Finally, a number of authors (Tedin, 1974; Jennings et al., 2001) have argued that the
transmission of political attitudes of parents to young people is mediated by the level
of political interest of young people. Young people are more readily exposed to
socialization experiences if they have high levels of interest to start with. In families
characterized by an ‘overexposure to politics’ or by ‘frequently and intimately contact
with political matters’, young people are socialized more effectively with as a result
that they are more likely to participate (Prewitt, 1965:105). A reasonable assumption,
therefore, is that intergenerational transmission of attitudes and behaviors will be
more successful if the adolescent has high levels of political interest. Self-evidently,
one could also argue that political interest by itself is already an outcome of political
10
socialization (Peterson, 2006; Niemi et al., 1978), but in line with some of the earlier
research, in our analysis we will treat political interest as an intermediary variable.
This overview of the literature provides us with four basic hypotheses about the
parental influence on political participation. Parents can have an effect on the political
participation of their offspring by:
H1: providing them with information
H2: talking with their children about politics
H3: participating themselves
H4: providing children with a stable home environment
Further we also want to investigate if:
H5: parental socialization is more effective in families with a higher socioeconomic status
H6: parental socialization is mediated by the political interest of young people
themselves
We will test those hypotheses further in depth, using the data from the Comparative
Youth Survey 2006.
Data and Methods
The Comparative Youth Survey 2006 (CYS 2006) is a representative survey on the
social and political attitudes of young people that was administered simultaneously in
Belgium, Canada and Romania among sixteen year olds (Hooghe et al., 2006; Stolle,
11
2006; Badescu, 2006). In Belgium 6,330 respondents participated in the survey, in
Canada 3,334 and in Romania 1,876. Despite the fact that in every country the utmost
care was taken to reach a representative sample of 16 year-old high school students,
the national differences in the education systems imply that the three samples cannot
simply be pooled. The CYS 2006 data set, however, does allow us to compare the
effects of political socialization in stable democracies (Belgium and Canada) with the
situation in a newly emerging democratic system (Romania). By comparing the
parental socialization patterns in these three countries, we hope to detect more general
patterns of political socialization processes.
Our main dependent variable is the political participation of the respondents in this
survey. In this respect we opted for a broad definition of political participation, that
also includes various protest and engagement acts, unconventional participation,
political consumerism and life-style politics (Barnes & Kaase, 1979; Stolle, Hooghe
& Micheletti, 2005; Dalton 2007). The questionnaire included ten different acts where
the adolescents could indicate whether or not they had participated in them during the
previous twelve months: boycotting and buycotting products, donating money,
signing petitions, protesting and attending a show with political content, wearing a
badge, illegal protesting, forwarding political emails, and displaying messages. Data
reduction showed that these items from a solid, one-dimensional scale with a
Cronbach’s alpha of 0.662, 0.739 and 0.617 for respectively Belgium, Canada and
Romania. Therefore, we feel safe in developing a simple sum-scale for these ten
items, ranging from 0 to 10. In the three countries, the average score on this scale is
ca. 4, and the scale will be used as the main dependent variable in the rest of the
analysis.
12
Looking at the frequencies of political participation, one can observe that in every
country, donating or raising money is the most popular activity among 16 year olds
(Table 1). The signing of petitions occurs very frequently in Belgium and Canada, but
petitions are clearly less widespread in Romania. For wearing a badge too, there are
clear differences: whereas ca. 15 percent of the respondents has worn a badge in
Romania and Belgium, this is 33 percent in Canada. This can partly be explained by
the fact that wearing a badge is a typical habit in Northern America. Another element
might be that the survey was conducted during an electoral campaign in Canada,
which might have led to a higher level of badge-wearing activity in that country. In
the three countries, illegal forms of protest and writing messages in public are clearly
less often practiced.
Table 1. Frequency of Political Participation among Adolescents (CYS 2006)
Belgium
Canada
Romania
Donating/donating money
43.4
74.1
65.8
Signing petitions
39.7
51.6
17.3
Buycotting products
18.8
26.7
13.9
Boycotting products
18.3
26.9
22.4
Wearing a badge
15.4
33.1
14.0
Attending a show with political content
12.9
26.3
27.1
Forwarding political emails
11.8
20.9
6.4
Protesting
11.5
20.5
10.8
Illegal protesting
7.1
6.5
6.7
Displaying/writing messages
4.8
12.5
6.9
Mean number of political activities
3.95
4.47
4.02
Number of cases
6,330
3,334
1,876
The entries are the percentage of respondents who participated ‘a few times’ or ‘often’ in that activity
during the previous twelve months. Source: CYS 2006.
13
The independent variables in our analysis all refer to the way the respondents
ascertain their familial background, and their interaction with their parents. First we
want to determine whether adolescents actually receive political information from
their parents. The first parental influence measure is a dummy variable which
indicates whether the respondents rate their parents as the most important source of
political information, in contrast to the information obtained from friends, television,
newspapers, the Internet, radio or school (0=no, 1=yes). This was the case for
approximately 15 percent of all respondents, and we did not observe any strong
differences between the three countries included in the present study.
A second variable is the intensity of political discussion within the family. This was
measured using a 4 point scale (never, once in a while, fairly often, all the time). Here
we can observe that while Canadian parents seem to talk quite frequently about
politics with their children, the percentage is lower in Belgium and Romania. We also
have to acknowledge that the CYS data set only includes information obtained from
the respondents themselves, so we do not have any information on how the parents
assess the intensity of political discussion within their family. The survey also
informed whether parents tend to talk in a negative or a positive manner about politics
(0=negative, 1=positive). The results show that Romanian parents more often refrain
from giving criticism toward the political system of the country.
Third, the questionnaire included an item on voluntary activity by the parents (0=no
activity, 1=parent volunteers). Here we notice that while more than one third of the
Canadian respondents reported that their parents are involved in voluntary
associations, this is only 2 per cent in Romania.
14
Finally, we measured the presence of a stable home environment (0= not stable; 1=
stable). More than 80 per cent of respondents in Romania indicated that the lived with
both their biological parents and this percentage was down to 60 in Belgium.
Table 2. Family Background Characteristics
Belgium
Parents most important source
Canada
Romania
13.0
15.4
14.3
never
16.7
10.7
15.6
often/always
24.8
44.2
19.4
41.0
41.9
55.2
Parents volunteer
17.2
35.4
2.2
Stable home environment
60.7
65.5
82.1
6,330
3,334
1,876
of political information
Talk about politics with parents
Parents talk positively about
politics
n
Information obtained on family background. Entries are percentages of respondents in that country.
Source: CYS 2006.
In our analysis we will also include several control variables: gender, citizenship
status, socio-economic status of the family and the child and finally also the number
of hours the respondent watches television. First, we take gender into account,
because research usually demonstrates that men tend to participate more intensively
than women (Burns, Schlozman, & Verba, 2001), although some recent studies show
contradictory evidence (Claibourn & Sapiro, 2001; Hooghe & Stolle, 2004; Norris,
2006). Second, we also take citizenship status into account, because respondents that
do not have citizenship status often are formally excluded from certain forms of
political participation (Verba, Schlozman, & Brady, 1995). Third, we also included
controls for socio-economic status, although it is notoriously difficult to measure SES
in a reliable manner using a youth survey. Therefore we combined a number of
15
measurements. For the parents we included the attained education level. For the
respondent, we combined the measurement of educational goal (the number of years
one intends to study further) and the access to the of books at home. Although the
validity of these measures are often contested, youth research routinely relies on this
kind of measures to get a basic understanding of socio-economic status and economic
background of the family. Earlier efforts to ask children about family income in
practice lead to missing answers and unreliable information (Torney-Purta et al.,
2001; Woessmann, 2004). The question on the number of books at home has already
proved its use in a number of youth and educational surveys, including leading
research efforts like the TIMMS and PISA research on educational attainment.
Because both status measurements will be related, it will be important to control for
multicollinearity in our analysis. Finally, we also control for the time spent on
watching television, as we assume that intensive television use leads to lower levels of
civic engagement (Putnam, 2000; Besley, 2006).
Since our dependent variable is a participation index scale (range 0-10) we will rely
mostly on Ordinary Least Squares regressions, analyzing the three country samples
separately. All the variables used in the analysis are presented in Appendix I of this
article.
Results
In our first model (Table 3) we assess the impact of all the individual and parental
background characteristics on political participation .The results show a remarkable
consistency across the three countries. Talking about politics with your parents
obviously has a strong effect on participation, while parents who are active in
16
voluntary activities also set a clear and effective example. Only in Romania do we
observe some effect of the presence of a stable home environment.
The control variables do not show a lot of surprises. The socio-economic status of the
respondent is positively related to participation, except in Romania. Those who have
citizenship status are more active, while women outperform men. Television seems to
depress engagement levels, although the effect is only significant in Belgium.
Both SES measurements included in the model were indeed correlated, but the
variance inflation factor did not reveal any danger of multicollinearity (Miles &
Shevlin, 2001).
This first analysis, therefore, already confirms our basic hypotheses: intra-family
discussions about politics and the example of parents who volunteer themselves have
a significant effect on the participation levels of young people. Providing adolescents
with political information (Hypothesis 1), or with a stable home environment, on the
other hand (Hypothesis 4), was not related to the intensity of participation. The
analysis also indicates that the situation in Romania could be different from the one in
Canada or Belgium: while volunteering is significant in the two stable democracies, it
does not reach significance in Romania.
17
Table 3. Effect of Background Characteristics and Parents on Political
Participation
Belgium
Canada
Romania
Parental Influence
Parents information source
-0.013(ns)
-0.089***
0.029(ns)
Parents volunteer
0.081***
0.073***
0.000(ns)
Discussion about politics
0.111***
0.175***
0.206***
Talk positively about politics
-0.020(ns)
-0.046*
0.006(ns)
Stable home environment
-0.027(ns)
-0.019(ns)
-0.064*
Gender (0=Girl; 1= Boy)
-0.064***
-0.119***
-0.042(ns)
Socio-economic status
0.172***
0.142***
0.019(ns)
Socio-economic status parents
0.002(ns)
-0.001(ns)
0.031(ns)
Hours spent on television
-0.081***
-0.026(ns)
-0.049(ns)
Citizenship (0=not a citizen)
0.022*
0.062**
-0.103***
Explained variance (R²)
0.080
0.105
0.058
N
4,537
2,218
1,344
Control variables
respondent
Entries are standardized coefficients, resulting from an OLS regression (separate for the three
countries). Dependent variable: political participation index (0-10 scale). Source: CYS 2006.
Sign. : ***: p<0.001;**: p<0.01; *: p<0.05.
Hypothesis 5 claims that families with a high socio-economic status are more
effective in transmitting political values and behavioral patterns than families with
lower socio-economic status. This implies the occurrence of an interaction effect: both
in low- and in high status families, we assume the same kind of socialization agents
will be at work, but with different levels of success. Therefore, in our next model we
also include a number of interaction effects (Table 4). We included the status of the
respondents (educational goal and number of books at home), in combination with
measurements on volunteering, discussion politics, etc. Given the extended use of the
items on the status of the respondent, and to avoid multicollinearity, in this analysis
18
we had to drop the second status indicator (educational level parents). The inclusion
of the whole battery of interaction effects leads to the result that all direct effects loose
their significance, with the exception of political discussions in the family for the
Romanian sample. In Belgium and Canada, on the other hand, we do observe a
significant effect of the interaction effect between political discussion and socioeconomic status. To put if differently: in these two countries political discussion has a
stronger effect on participation in families with a high socio-economic status. This,
however, is not the case for Romania. Nevertheless for the two stable democracies,
we can confirm the hypothesis that high status families apparently have a stronger
effect on political participation than low status families.
For the control variables, there are only small changes in this model, as gender,
citizenship status and the hours spent on television keep the same effect as in the
earlier model.
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Table 4. Interaction Effects of Background Characteristics on Political
Participation
Belgium
Canada
Romania
Parental Influence
Parents information source
-0.060(ns)
-0.150(ns)
-0.004(ns)
0.085(ns)
0.158(ns)
0.094(ns)
Discussion about politics
-0.051(ns)
-0.159(ns)
0.314**
Talk positively about politics
-0.029(ns)
-0.093(ns)
0.101(ns)
0.010(ns)
-0.021(ns)
0.042(ns)
SES*Information
-0.079(ns)
0.063(ns)
0.018(ns)
SES*Volunteering
-0.004(ns)
-0.070(ns)
-0.060(ns)
0.267***
0.447***
-0.161(ns)
-0.020(ns)
0.052(ns)
-0.096(ns)
-0.047(ns)
0.003(ns)
-0.101(ns)
-0.065***
-0.132***
-0.043(ns)
0.039(ns)
-0.063(ns)
0.195*
-0.074***
-0.023(ns)
-0.039(ns)
0.027*
0.047*
-0.083***
Explained variance (R²)
0.088
0.114
0.054
Number of cases
5,131
2,622
1,627
Parents volunteer
Stable home environment
Interaction Parental Influence
and SES
SES*Political discussion
SES*Talk positively about
politics
SES*Stable home environment
Control variables
Gender (0=Girl; 1= Boy)
Socio-economic status
respondent
Hours spent on television
Citizenship (0=not a citizen)
Entries are standardized coefficients, resulting from an OLS regression (separate for the three
countries). Dependent variable: political participation index (0-10 scale). Source: CYS 2006.
Sign. : ***: p<0.001;**: p<0.01; *: p<0.05.
Hypothesis 6 assumes the occurrence of a mediating effect of political interest levels.
In Model 3, therefore, we also include the political interest of the respondent, which is
measured by a 4 point-scale. In this final model we also include the only interaction
20
effect that proved to be strongly significant, i.e., the interaction between discussion of
politics in the family and socio-economic status. The results of this analysis are listed
in Table 5.
A first thing to be noticed is that by including political interest in the model, the
explained variance (R²) increases substantially compared to the results of our earlier
models. For Canada, e.g., explained variance almost doubles from 0.11 to 0.20.
Completely in line with earlier research, it can be observed that political interest is
strongly related to political participation patterns. Again, however, it has to be noticed
that the explained variance for our model is substantially lower in Romania than it is
in Canada and Belgium.
Second, it can be observed that the inclusion of political interest has some effects on
the initial parameter estimates (Table 3), but that the general pattern remains the same.
Discussion of politics within the family, and parents who do volunteering remain
powerful, although the volunteering of parents does not seem to have an effect in
Romania.
In the two stable democracies, the interaction effect of political discussion and socioeconomic status remains highly significant. With regard to the control variables, the
effects of gender, citizenship status and television watching largely remain
unchanged. While it is obvious (and almost tautological) that political interest will
have an effect on political participation, the inclusion of political interest does not
mean that the other independent variables loose their significance.
21
Table 5. Effects on Political Participation, with Political Interest
Belgium
Canada
Romania
Parental Influence
Parents information source
-0.005(ns)
-0.039*
0.018(ns)
0.081***
0.095***
0.036(ns)
Discussion about politics
-0.093(ns)
-0.240**
0.279**
Talk positively about politics
-0.021(ns)
-0.050**
0.001(ns)
-0.032*
0.004(ns)
-0.042(ns)
0.251***
0.404***
-0.185(ns)
-0.070***
-0.139***
-0.041(ns)
respondent
-0.002(ns)
-0.097(ns)
0.128(ns)
Hours spent on television
-0.069***
-0.012(ns)
-0.045(ns)
Citizenship (0=not a citizen)
0.024(ns)
0.051**
-0.082***
Political interest
0.206***
0.330***
0.166***
Explained variance (R²)
0.126
0.201
0.071
N
5,104
2,608
1,615
Parents volunteer
Stable home environment
Interaction Parental SES
SES*Talk about politics
Control variables
Gender (0=Girl; 1= Boy)
Socio-economic status
Entries are standardized coefficients, resulting from an OLS regression (separate for the three
countries). Dependent variable: political participation index (0-10 scale). Source: CYS 2006.
Sign. : ***: p<0.001;**: p<0.01; *: p<0.05.
Discussion
The results of our analyses suggest that the intergenerational transmission of political
participation patterns is still an important element of political socialization in
contemporary societies. Discussion of politics within the family, and the role model of
parents who are actively engaged in voluntary activities themselves exert a powerful
effect on participation patterns of adolescents. Despite the fact that the socialization
22
effect of parents has not been studied intensively in recent political science research,
our results suggest that this still remains a very influential socialization agent.
With regard to the causal mechanism involved, we can observe that receiving political
information from one’s parents obviously is not a necessary condition to become
actively involved in politics. The alleged effects of a stable home environment also
did not show up in our analysis.
In general, the results of our analysis show stronger effects of discussion about
politics than of voluntary activity by the parents themselves. It has to be
acknowledged that this partly might be the effect of a measurement issue. If
respondents report that they discuss politics with their parents, there is clear face
validity. There can be no discussion between parents and children, without the
children (and thus the respondents in this survey) being knowledgeable about it. We
can be less certain about the validity of the volunteering item. It might be that parents
are in reality actively involved in civic activities, but without their children knowing
about it, or without them labeling it as voluntary activity. The volunteering item,
therefore, is more vulnerable for issues of validity than the discussion item.
There is another element involved: discussions within the family about politics at least
imply that parents and children do have time for one another, and that they interact in
a quite intensive manner. The fact that parents are involved in voluntary activities, on
the other hand, might also imply that they are often absent from the house, which
would imply that the socialization experiences within the family might become less
intensive and therefore less effective. In extreme cases, with a heavily involvement in
voluntary life by the parents, this might even invoke negative reactions from the
adolescents taking part in this survey.
23
Our analysis also demonstrated that there is a strong interaction effect between socioeconomic status and discussion about politics: in families with a high status,
discussion seems to be a particularly powerful tool to transmit political value patterns.
We do not only know that in these families there will tend to be more discussions
going on, but this discussion by itself also has a stronger effect on participation levels.
Again, a word of caution is in order here. The interaction effect we observed might
also point to the fact that in families with a high education status, the discussion on
political affairs are simply more intense, with a stronger emotional or cognitive
involvement, and therefore, they might lead to stronger socialization effects. In the
questionnaire, we do not find any questions on the intensity or the nature of political
discussions within the family.
While our models were quite successful and robust for Canada and Belgium, this was
to a lesser extent the case for the Romanian sample. The influence of the family on the
socialization in political participation is not as strong in Romania as in Belgium and
Canada. Whereas in Belgium and Canada families with a higher socio-economic
status are more successful in transmitting political attitudes and behavioral patterns,
Romanian parents are not so successful. Various elements might play a role in
explaining these differences. First of all, we have to consider the element of
measurement validity. To measure socio-economic status, we relied on indirect
measurements like the number of books at home or the education level that was
obtained. For most Western societies, these are quite valid measurements, since they
are closely related to income level and other status indicators. In the former
authoritarian regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, on the other hand, this might not
be the case because, before 1989, there was no direct link between educational
possibilities, material status and cultural participation. Since the book market did not
24
respond to market pressures, various other elements might explain why some families
have lots of books at home, and others do not. But even if the measurement of socioeconomic status would be correct for Romania too, one can still observe that there is a
difference between stable and emerging democracies. In stable democracies like
Canada and Belgium, parents can transmit their value patterns and behavior in a more
or less direct manner to the next generation. For Romania this is not the case, for the
simple reason that the parents themselves were socialized in a totally different, nondemocratic era (Sapiro, 2004; Niemi et al., 1995). This is also the case with regard to
participation: in the Romanian sample, only 2 per cent of the respondents indicate that
their parents are emerged in voluntary activities, a percentage that is a much lower
than in the other two countries that were involved in the CYS study. A comparison
with other data sources on volunteering in Romania shows that while this percentage
is extremely low, it is not an unrealistic estimate of the actual amount of volunteering
going on in the country. The challenge of intergenerational transmission is therefore
completely different in a country like Romania. While in Belgium and Canada, an
already existing political culture can be transmitted, the population of newly emerging
democracies is faced with the challenge that a new political culture has to be
constructed, straight from the beginning. This study of Romanian adolescents shows
that this is not an impossible task as, e.g., the participation levels of the Romanian
respondents is quite high. Nevertheless, it remains striking to observe that almost two
decades after the fall of authoritarian rule in Central and Eastern Europe, the legacy of
that era still lingers on, even among an age group that has never known the previous
era.
25
Appendix I: Variables used in the analysis
CYS Belgium
Parents source of information
Parents volunteer
Political Discussion in family
Talk positively about politics
Stable home environment
Gender (0=Girl)
Socio-economic status respondent
Socio-economic status parents
Hours of television
Citizenship status (0=not a citizen)
Political interest
Min
0
0
1
0
0
0
1.57
-1.73
1
0
1
Max
Min
0
0
1
0
0
0
1.24
-1.97
1
0
1
max
Min
0
0
1
0
0
0
1.24
-1.76
1
0
1
max
1
1
4
1
1
1
8.00
1.82
5
1
4
mean
0.13
0.17
2.10
0.41
0.61
1.53
5.31
0.00
3.25
0.94
1.98
Std.dev.
0.34
0.38
0.69
0.49
0.49
0.49
1.37
1.00
0.93
0.24
0.79
Missing
0
384
378
970
0
8
491
1164
44
20
55
mean
0.15
0.35
2.41
0.42
0.66
1.44
6.03
0.00
3.36
0.91
2.37
Std.dev.
0.36
0.48
0.78
0.49
0.48
0.49
1.20
1.00
1.03
0.28
0.88
Missing
0
6
150
341
0
12
505
724
13
11
25
mean
0.14
0.02
2.06
0.55
0.82
1.44
5.58
0.00
3.08
0.88
1.91
Std.dev.
0.35
0.15
0.63
0.49
0.38
0.49
1.30
1.00
0.93
0.33
0.72
Missing
11
0
37
93
42
0
42
365
7
27
19
N=6,330
CYS Canada
Parents source of information
Parents volunteer
Political Discussion in family
Talk positively about politics
Stable home environment
Gender (0=Girl)
Socio-economic status respondent
Socio-economic status parents
Hours of television
Citizenship status (0=not a citizen)
Political interest
1
1
4
1
1
1
8.00
1.43
5
1
4
N=3,334
CYS Romania
Parents source of information
Parents volunteer
Political Discussion in family
Talk positively about politics
Stable home environment
Gender (0=Girl)
Socio-economic status respondent
Socio-economic status parents
Hours of television
Citizenship status (0=not a citizen)
Political interest
1
1
4
1
1
1
8.00
2.11
5
1
4
N=1,876. Entries are minimum and maximum values of the variable, mean and standard deviation, and
missing values for that variable.
26
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