Nati per essere conservatori? Un’analisi multilivello della relazione tra ordine di genitura e conservatorismo

[Autom. eng. transl.] According to Sulloway (1996), which constitutes the main point of reference for social psychologists interested in the relationship between geniture order and conservatism, the status of firstborn, having led to the exclusive enjoyment of parental care until the birth of the second child, can impact on people's values, attitudes and political ideologies in two different ways. On the one hand, it would lead to trying to preserve the status quo and therefore to adhere to conservative ideologies. On the other hand, it would push people to identify strongly with their parents, to the extent of largely internalizing their political values, regardless of their being conservative or progressive. The present study aims to test these two hypotheses by overcoming the methodological limits of the tests conducted previously (Wichman et al., 2006), by adopting a properly familiar research design and applying multilevel analysis. 96 Italian families participated in the study, composed of both parents and two children (firstborn, average age = 23.7 years, and secondborn, average age = 19.5 years), for a total of 384 participants, who were required to complete the individual Conservatism subscale of the Portrait Values Questionnaire (Schwartz et al., 2001). The results clearly support the first Sulloway hypothesis, also checking the effects of other within-family (eg: gender) and between-family variables (eg: educational level of parents and age of the mother at birth of the firstborn); the interactions between the values of fathers and mothers on the one hand and the parenting order of children on the other hand did not affect the conservatism of the latter. The implications of the results and future developments for research are discussed.