The Contribution of Family Culture to Political Participation, Political Outlook, and Its Reproduction

Abstract

In a secondary analysis of data from a study of political socialization among Israeli teenagers, this article employs a modified and abbreviated version of Chaffee and McLeod's typology of family communications (FCP) to examine its relationship to political participation, political outlook, and the “reproduction” of parents' political outlook in their children. The findings confirm that the pluralist family is most likely to induce political participation, measured by media exposure, political knowledge, and conversation. Family communication pattern was also found to be associated with political outlook, measured in terms of hawkish-dovish orientations to the Arab-Israeli conflict, with a disproportionate number of dovish parents and children in the pluralist families. Nevertheless, the rate of reproduction of specific outlook does not vary significantly among the four types of family communication patterns, except for a suggestion in the data that families have a better chance of reproducing doves when they encourage their children to argue.