Personality, values, amoral familism, sociability and political attitudes differently predict political participation

"Following Tocqueville, Agulhon and Putnam, political participation through associations is thought be the cornerstone of social capital development. Banfield has pointed out that, especially in Italy, amoral familism – a notion close to nepotism - is an obstacle to the formation of associations and to the growth of social capital. In this study we tested a hypothesis about the role of personality, values, familism, sociability and attitudes as predictors of civic and political engagement. Methods: 405 participants, approximately equally distributed across the north, center and south of Italy completed survey on political participation which also included the big five (BFI), values (PVQ 40), egalitarianism, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, sociability and political attitudes (expertise, interest, self-efficacy), plus new scales assessing amoral familism and beliefs in a free society. Different regression models were constructed to discover the best predictors of political participation, then structural equation modeling was used to test a causal model. Results: Hierarchical regression analyses showed that the effects of traits and values, familism and proxies for ideology were not significant after controlling for political attitudes. Demographic variables were controlled for. A structural model with associative sociability and political interest as exogenous variables and political sociability, self-efficacy and participation as endogenous variables showed a good fit to the data. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that amoral familism, values and ideology have a minimal role as predictors of political participation; however we extended the work of Foschi and Lauriola (2014) by showing that political attitudes and sociability played a major role.