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Persistence and Change in Political Confidence over the Life-span: Embedding Life-cycle Socialization in Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Kenneth P. Langton
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Extract

There are currently two views of the potential link between early learning and adult political attitudes and behaviour. The first holds that the consequences of early socialization persist over the life-cycle and have a pervasive effect on adult behaviour. Much of the research on child and adolescent political socialization adhered to this position. It is supported by studies which find that some orientations and personality dispositions seem relatively stable over time. This approach also finds some support in research which shows that earlier-learned orientations and experiences may influence later attitudes and behaviour, although this has been strongly contested.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , October 1984 , pp. 461 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1 See Easton, David and Dennis, Jack, Children in the Political System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969)Google Scholar; Hess, Robert and Torney, Judith, The Development of Political Attitudes in Children (Chicago: Aldine, 1967)Google Scholar; and Sears, David O., ‘Political Socialization’, in Greenstein, Fred I. and Polsby, Nelson W., eds, Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 2: Micropolitical Theory (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975).Google Scholar

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8 Literal consistency refers to the percentage of respondents falling on the main diagonal of a turnover table.

9 Jennings, M. Kent and Niemi, Richard, ‘The Transmission of Political Values from Parent to Child’, American Political Science Review, LXII (1968), 169–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Connell, Robert, ‘Political Socialization in the American Family: The Evidence Re-examined’, Public Opinion Quarterly, XXXVI (1972), 323–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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14 Renshon, Stanley Allen, Psychological Needs and Political behavior (New York: Free Press, 1974).Google Scholar

15 One must not be misled by adjectives such as ‘objective’ when distinguishing between the actual environment and the subject's perceptions of that environment. Independent ‘objective’ measures of setting in the social sciences are typically based on the perceptions of that setting by the research scholar or by a panel of observers. These independent perceptions of the situation can then be compared to the subject's perception of the situation.

16 In social psychology the ‘halo effect’ sometimes means the impact of specific evaluations on global evaluations. Here ‘halo effect’ refers to the influence of memories of effective participation in past settings on the perception that one can participate effectively in current situations.

17 The families, peer groups, schools and jobs that allow the most participation will be described variously as less authoritarian or repressive, or more democratic or participatory.

18 FH: high family participation; FL: low family participation; SH: high school participation; SL: low school participation; JH: high job participation; JL: low job participation.

19 Any model would be hard pressed to reflect the complex dynamics of political learning. This attempt to capture the broad sweep of effects over the life-cycle will necessarily simplify the learning process and the simultaneous effects of different events and settings. For example, learning does not always occur in a linear fashion. Although we are assuming for illustrative purposes that learning in the family precedes school learning and that school learning precedes learning in the job, in some cases the learning may be concurrent.

20 Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For sampling procedures and survey methods, see Chapter 2 and Appendices A and B.

21 Bandura, Albert, Social Learning Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977)Google Scholar; Langten, Kenneth P., Political Participation and Learning (N. Quincy, Mass.: Christopher Publishing House, 1980)Google Scholar; Langton, Kenneth P. and Petrescu, Octavian, ‘Cognitive and Situational Antecedents to Worker Participation’Google Scholar, paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Denver, Colorado, 1982; Tedin, Kent, ‘Assessing Peer and Parent Influence on Adolescent Political Attitudes’, American Journal of Political Science, XXIV (1980), 136–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

When I refer in the following analysis to the ‘influence’ of the family or school, the reference is of course to the relation between adults' perceptions of their past participation in a socialization agency and their current political confidence. There is a potential methodological problem with this assumption (see Langton, , Political ParticipationGoogle Scholar). When adults are asked to recall the environment of their parents' family they may not be able to remember. Forgetting may be greater among older respondents when they reflect on their early family milieu. The only accurate test of this confounding problem involves a panel study controlling for the impact of agents outside the family. The USA and Peruvian data are cross-sectional. It is possible, however, to draw some inferences about the effects of forgetting with the passage of time. Experimental psychological research on attitude change shows that the rate of forgetting the character of persuasive communication diminishes over time. As Arthur Cohen said in Attitude Change and Social Influence (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p. 13Google Scholar, ‘we forget most rapidly immediately after learning, and in successive equal time intervals we forget proportionately less.’ One might expect, by inference, that the principal distortion of perceptions occurs within a relatively short period after leaving the environment of the home or school. To examine this hypothesis, the USA sample was broken into separate age cohorts. Representing the distortion effects as a first-order Markov chain, each cohort's perceptions of family and school participation were treated quasilongitudinally. The simplex solution for linear programming problems offered a technique for estimating the entries in the Markov transformation matrices while constraining the entries to the interval between 0 and 1. The largest shift in remembrance occurs among the youngest age group, shortly after direct family socialization experience has normally ceased. Thus the findings reflect more closely the literature in experimental psychology than the Stereotypie image of ageing and increased memory distortion. This analysis is only suggestive. It does imply, however, that forgetting as measurement error is much more complicated than frequently assumed and that its form may be quite different at various points in the life-cycle.

22 The three cumulative indices were based on the following questions:

Family Participation (USA), 1. As you were growing up, let's say when you were around 16, how much influence do you remember having in family decisions affecting yourself? 2. If a decision was made that you didn't like, did you feel free to complain… or was it better not to complain? 3. When your parents made decisions affecting you, how well did you think they understood your needs?

School Participation (USA): 1. In some schools the children are encouraged to discuss and debate political and social issues and to make up their own minds. How was it in your school? How much chance did the students have to express their opinions?. Did the teachers in your school treat everyone fairly or were some treated better than others? 3. If you felt you had been treated unfairly in some way or disagreed with something the teacher said, did you feel free to talk with the teacher about it?

Work Participation (USA): 1. We'd like to find out how decisions are made on your job. When decisions are made affecting your own work, do those in authority over you ever consult you about them? 2. If a decision were made affecting your own work that you disagreed with strongly, would you feel free to complain? 3. If you did complain, would it do any good?

I am assuming that school experiences follow those in the family, although in some cases they may overlap.

23 A cumulative three point political confidence index was created from the following three questions (USA): 1. If you made an effort to change a local government regulation, how likely is it that you would succeed? 2. If you made an effort to change a law being considered by the national congress, how likely is it that you would succeed?. People like me don't have much say about what government does.

The literature on political efficacy and political confidence is voluminous. It is one of the dispositions most frequently used in the psychological analysis of political behaviour. Legions of experts have linked it to vote turnout, cynicism, trust and general political participation. For a review of much of this literature see Langton, , Political Participation.Google Scholar Theoretically similar constructs such as political competence, self-esteem and individual competence are discussed in Greenstein, Fred, ‘Personality and Politics’, in Greenstein, Fred and Polsby, Nelson, eds, Handbook of Political Science, 2 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975)Google Scholar; Morse, Stan and Gergen, Kenneth, ‘Social Comparison, Self-Consistency and the Concept of Self’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, XVI (1980), 148–56Google Scholar; Muller, Edward, ‘Cross-National Dimension of Political Competence’, American Political Science Review, LXIV (1970), 792–809CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenberg, Morris, Conceiving the Self (New York: Basic Books, 1979)Google Scholar; and Stone, William and Baril, G. L., ‘Self-Other Orientation and Legislative behavior’, Journal of Personality, XLVII (1979), 162–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Almond, and Verba, , Civic Culture, p. 371.Google Scholar Almond and Verba found only a 2 per cent change in high subjective competence associated with exposure to participatory and non-participatory schools in the USA, p. 354, Table 20.

25 The analysis that follows focuses on the persistence and change in efficacy across the life-span. I am less interested here in the variance in adult political confidence associated with exposure to the socialization environments. We did find elsewhere, however, that exposure to participatory family, school and job settings was independently associated with the placement of 29 per cent, 18 per cent and 24 per cent of the USA sample at the medium and high efficiency levels, see Langton, Kenneth P. and Karns, David, ‘Political Socialization and National Development: Some Hypotheses and Data’, Western Political Quarterly, XXVII (1974), 217–38.Google Scholar

26 See Langton, Kenneth P., ‘The Influence of Military Service on Social Consciousness and Protest Behavior: A Study of Peruvian Mine Workers’, Comparative Political Studies, XVI (1984), 479–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 See Magill, John, Labor Unions and Political Socialization: A Case Study of Bolivian Workers (New York: Praeger, 1974)Google Scholar; Petras, James and Zeitlin, Maurice, ‘Miners and Agrarian Radicalism in Chile’, American Sociological Review, XXXII (1967), 578–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Konings, Piet, The Political Potential of Ghanian Miners (Leyden, Netherlands: Africa Studies Center, 1978)Google Scholar; Bates, Robert, Unions, Parties and Political Development: A Study of Mine Workers in Zambia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Whitehead, Lawrence, ‘Miners as Voters: The Electoral Process in Bolivia's Mining Camps’, Journal of Latin American Studies, XIII (1981), 313–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zapata, Francisco, ‘Los Mineros del Cobre Y el Gobierno Militar en Chile entre 1972 y 1981’, Boletin de Estudios Latino Americanos Y del Caribe, XXXII (1982), 39–47.Google Scholar

28 Laite, Julian, ‘Miners and National Politics in Peru, 1900–1974’, Journal of Latin American Studies, XII (1980), 317–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Dewind, Adrian, ‘Peasants Become Miners’, Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1977.Google Scholar

30 For further discussion of sample characteristics see Langton, , ‘The Influence of Military Service’, p. 484.Google Scholar

31 Family Participation Index: 1. When you were growing up – when you were about 14 years old – how much influence did you have on family decisions which affected you? 2. If your parents made decisions that you didn't like, did you feel you had the right to complain… or did you feel it was better not to say anything? 3. If you complained or differed with the decision of your parents, did it have a lot, some or no influence?

Peer Group Participation Index: 1. Let's talk about your friends, your best friends. When you were, we'll say, 14–17 years old, do you remember if you were able to influence your friends when you all were deciding to do something? 2. If your friends made decisions that you didn't like, did you feel you had the right to complain… or was it better not to say anything? 3. If you complained or differed with the decision of your friends, did it have a lot, some, or no influence?

School Participation Index: 1. Some schools allow students to talk about real life problems, others don't. Did you have the opportunity to express your opinions in school? 2. If you were treated unjustly or when you did not agree with what your teacher had decided, did you feel free to express your opinion to the teacher… or was it better not to speak with the teacher about it? 3. If you confronted the teacher, did it make a lot, some, or no difference in his/her attitude?

Job Participation Index: 1. In general, thinking about your work in the mine, when the company makes decisions that affect your job, do they consult you about their decisions?

Political Confidence Index: 1. I believe that government authorities care about what people like me want. 2. When state authorities say they are going to do something, I can depend on them to do it. 3. I have some influence over what the government does.

32 Kruijt, Kirk, ‘Mining and Miners in Central Peru, 1968–1980’, Boletin de Estudios Latino Americanas Y del Caribe, XXXII (1982), 49–60.Google Scholar

33 A possibility that I cannot examine with cross-sectional data is that some people with high efficacy may have sought a job which granted more autonomy. To the extent this occurs it is probably dampened by the educational and employment homogeneity of the miners. From personal observation by myself and others and self-reports of miners, the mining industry in Peru is organized hierarchically in the manner of the rationalized, late capitalist business organization. It is an unlikely place for job applicants to seek out workplace autonomy. See Kruijt, , ‘Mining and Miners’.Google Scholar

34 Another example of an apparent association out of context between adult political confidence (+26) and confidence levels early in life (+28) with an intervening change of 12 points associated with a change in context is in Figure 3: FH, SL, JH.

35 Private conversation with Hyman Kornbluh, Director of Program in Labor Education, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, The University of Michigan, January 1982.