Poster #96 - The Spread of Political Alienation from Parents to Adolescent Children

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

Political alienation is growing in many western democracies. Among adolescents, voting rates and commitment to political parties have declined, accompanied by increasing distrust of politicians and political institutions (Dalton, 2000). Although many factors play a role in adolescent political socialization, we focus here on one of the most salient: Parent attitudes about politics (Cicognani et al., 2012). The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that parent influence over adolescent political alienation varies as a function of family climate, such that the spread of alienation is most likely to occur in the context of close, warm relationships.
Participants included 571 adolescents (314 girls, 257 boys) and their mothers and fathers from a longitudinal study of families in Thüringen, Germany. Adolescents were in the 6th (M=12.24 years old), 8th (M=13.48 years old), and 10th (M=15.51 years old) grade at the outset, drawn from 36 randomly selected public high schools. Most participants came from two biological-parent families (80.1%). All participants were ethnic Germans.
Adolescents and each of their parents completed a questionnaire (Fischer & Kohr, 1980) describing their own political alienation across two time points, approximately one year apart. Adolescents also described perceptions of maternal and paternal warmth (Reitzel et al., 2011).
Two sets of Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) analyses (Kenny, 2006), modified for longitudinal data (Popp et al., 2008) were conducted. The first set of analyses examined the spread of political alienation between parents and adolescents (see Figure 1). The second set of analyses determined whether the spread of political alienation between parents and adolescents was moderated by adolescent perceptions of parental warmth. To this end, dyads were classified into groups based on adolescent reports of Time 1 warmth in mother-adolescent and father-adolescent relationships: High warmth (1 SD above the mean) and low warmth (1 SD below the mean). Multiple group contrasts compared the magnitude of partner paths across high and low parental warmth groups. Follow-up simple slope analyses probed statistically significant moderated associations at low and high levels of perceived parental warmth.
The first set of analyses revealed that mother and father political alienation predicted increases in subsequent adolescent political alienation (mother: β=.17, p<.01; father: β=.14, p<.01), but that adolescent political alienation did not predict changes in parent alienation. The second set of analyses revealed that these associations were strongest in relationships characterized as high warmth (see Figure 1 and 2). Specifically, greater initial parent political alienation predicted subsequent increases in adolescent political alienation in relationships high, but not low, in warmth.
Political alienation spreads from parents to adolescent children, which may have the unfortunate consequence of contributing to low political participation among young voters (Henn et al., 2005). The findings confirm what others have hypothesized (e.g., Tedin, 1974), namely that in households where parents and adolescents are close, parents transmit political alienation to their adolescent children. The findings point to a potentially promising new avenue of raising political participation among adolescents and young adults: Targeting the political attitudes of those with whom they are close.

Authors

• Mary Page Leggett-James, Florida Atlantic University
  Presenting Author

• Katharina Eckstein, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany

• Peter Noack, University of Jena

• Brett Laursen, Florida Atlantic University

• Ashley Richmond