Political Philosophy as a (Partial) Mediator of the Association Between Family Communication Patterns and Perception of Candidate Credibility in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

This investigation evaluated a theoretical model whereby political philosophy mediates the association between family communication patterns and perception of candidate credibility in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Participants included younger and older adults reporting on communication in their family of origin, political beliefs, and evaluations of both candidates. Results supported the expectation, guided by the moral foundations hypothesis, that family-of-origin communication patterns predict political philosophy in adulthood, with both conversation and conformity orientations predicting conservative beliefs. As predicted, political philosophy mediated the association between family communication patterns and candidate credibility. Results clarify the family’s mechanism of political socialization, indicate both direct and indirect effects of family communication patterns on candidate evaluation, and suggest pluralistic and consensual families may be particularly effective at transmitting political beliefs between parents and their children.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Alyssa K. Isaguirre for her assistance with the conceptualization of this project and with data collection.

Notes

¹ Specifically, I analyzed two conditional process models (Hayes, 2013), whereby mother and father political philosophy moderated the associations in the model. To summarize, these models exhibited the following differences and similarities with the model reported in the main study: (a) Conversation orientation remained a positive predictor of both participant conservatism and Romney’s credibility; (b) Participant conservatism remained a positive predictor of Romney’s credibility and an inverse predictor of Obama’s credibility; (c) Conformity orientation ceased to be a positive predictor of participant conservatism, although it now inversely predicted Obama’s credibility (or, in the mother model, nearly so, p = .059); (d) Conversation and conformity no longer interacted to predict Obama’s credibility. Almost no evidence emerged for moderated mediation, except for a significant interaction between father conservatism and conversation orientation on participant conservatism (p < .05). Decomposition revealed that the positive effect of conversation orientation was limited to conservative fathers. For liberal fathers, high conversation children tend to have a liberal political philosophy, yet their philosophy is just as liberal as if they had come from a low conversation orientation family. The main effects for parental political philosophy were limited to participant political philosophy and, with the exception of mother’s political philosophy as a predictor of Romney’s credibility, did not extend to candidate credibility. Taking this post hoc analysis overall, it is noteworthy that the associations for conversation orientation remained intact. Thus, incorporating parental political philosophy seems to most alter the effect of conformity orientation, which may be unsurprising given the historical and conceptual affinity between conservatism and conformity. Nevertheless, these results are reported here tentatively, as this study did not directly measure the parents’ political philosophy. Fuller results of this analysis are available online at http://andrewledbetter.com/2015/05/15/additional-information-on-moderating-effect-of-motherfather-conservatism-ledbetter-2015-journal-of-family-communication/.