Parents and Children in the Political Socialisation Process: Changes in Italy Over Thirty-Five Years

In 1975 a team of sociologists and political scientists directed by Samuel Barnes and Max Kaase conducted an ambitious research on political attitudes in eight Western nations, including Italy. The investigation was extended to a sub-sample of adolescents (16-20 years old), whose parents were already part of the general sample. This dataset of parent-child pairs has never been analyzed before. Recently, our group has replicated the research using a questionnaire which largely reproduce the same questions asked in 1975, in order to study what has changed in intergenerational transmission of political attitudes in Italy 35 years after the first survey. Relevance of parental legacy for the political socialization has been largely discussed in the literature (Hyman 1959; Butler e Stokes 1974; Jennings e Niemi 1974). Recent studies (Jennings et al. 2001; Quintelier et al. 2007) have remarked the persistence of such influence, despite of changes in political context and familiar life. Our paper aims to tackle the topic testing two alternative hypothesis. According to the first one, declining importance of the traditional political ideologies (social-communist and catholic), which have dominated Italian political culture longer than other Western countries, should have produced a consistent weakening of parental transmission of political values. However, in the last two decades family has played an increasing crucial role in young Italians’ lives. Empirical evidence of this renewed importance are, for example, a delayed leaving home transition and a high level of direct monetary support from parents to children (two elements which connote Italian context more than other Western countries: see Buzzi, Cavalli and de Lillo 2002). The conflict culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s, characterized by the crisis of family’s authority, seems to be less relevant today. Thus, it is possibile to hypothesize a stronger parental legacy than that expressed in the past. In our analysis we will use parent-child (son/daughter) and random adult/adolescent indexes of similarity on different political attitudes and behaviours (party choice, left-right scale, interest in politics, trust in institutions, political and social participation, etc.) in order to estimate the net “parental effects” controlling for the more general “contextual effects”. We will also study the different impact of fathers and mothers (on sons and daughters), as well as the differences due to some structural variables such as social class, religion, territorial culture (i.e. South against North).