Information and Maturation in Children's Evaluation of Government Leadership During Watergate

Abstract

^N v 'EARLY a decade has passed since Watergate first emerged in the headlines. For most Americans, Watergate is indeed behind them. Still, it is instructive to return to Watergate, for it provides a good laboratory for examining the contribution of mass mediated political information to the political socialization process. Few events so pervaded the news media for so long. Now, with data emerging on the long-term implications of Watergate for the political system (Sigel and Hoskin, 1980), political scientists should investigate the roots of these implications as children, whose political values were largely shaped during the Watergate period, enter the voting population. In this paper, I shall examine which children were most affected by Watergate at the time-and who may have been scarred politically-by exploring the relative contributions of mass media information and personal maturation to the evaluation of the President during the crisis. In the past decade, researchers in both political science and communications (summarized by Kraus and Davis, 1976) have found the mass media to be important agents in the political socialization of children. Beyond providing express images of law enforcers, political figures, or even general power relationships through fictional programming, for example, television provides data on the real world in the form of news. Even where the news itself is used little by the politically maturing child, it often provides a stimulus for dinner-time discussion of political issues, concepts, or personalities. Beyond whatever role the news media play in setting the adult political agenda (Shaw and McCombs, 1977), they play a role as a source of political information in the news flow from parents to children. With respect to Watergate, studies by Hawkins, Pingree and Roberts (1975) and Chaffee and Becker (1975) demonstrated that children's exposure to news media had identifiable effects on young people's evaluations of the President. At the same time that researchers were demonstrating an interest in the role of mass media in the political socialization process, others were searching for theoretical explanations of the dynamics of political socialization. In particular, scholars from both political science (Bennet, 1975; Best, 1973; Friedman, 1977; Merelman, 1969; Patterson, 1979; Riccards, 1973) and communication (Becker, McCombs and McLeod, 1975) considered several psychological development theories as explanatory of the processes through which children come of age politically. These researchers argued that increments in the quantity and quality of political understanding are linked to progress along one or several psychological developmental continua; i.e., to advances made by the child in terms of cognitive skills, moral reasoning, or personality development and ego strength. Unfortunately, the recent interest in both mass media effects and the use of psychological concepts grew as separate strands of thought. Fresh insights into the political socialization process can be found by weaving these two