Silvia Russo

Objectives: Conspiracy thinking has played a significant role in shaping public responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic and has influenced citizens' adherence to government protocols, including reluctance to receive vaccination and adherence to public health measures. However, little attention has been paid to how contextual factors, such as the severity of the pandemic, interact with these beliefs. This study examines how the prevalence of the pandemic, defined as the ratio between the number of cases and swabs each day, moderated the relationship between conspiracy thinking and adherence to public health norms. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of the ResPOnsE COVID‐19 project, a rolling cross‐section two‐wave survey of Italian adults ( N = 5421) conducted between March and December 2021. Using a multilevel modelling approach, with data nested by day of data collection, we analysed the association between conspiracy beliefs, reluctance to receive a COVID‐19 vaccination and resistance to restrict personal freedoms, interacting conspiracy beliefs with daily variations in pandemic prevalence. Results: Conspiracy beliefs were positively associated with reluctance to receive the COVID‐19 vaccination and resistance to restrictions. The prevalence of the pandemic moderated these relationships: As the pandemic prevalence increased, conspiracy believers became more reluctant to get vaccinated but more accepting of restrictions on freedom. Conclusions: Our results emphasize the context‐dependent nature of the consequences of conspiracy beliefs. Rather than uniformly rejecting all public health measures, conspiracist citizens adjust their responses depending on contextual factors. These findings challenge simplistic representations of their attitudes and emphasize the need for dynamic public health communication strategies.

Objective: We aimed to predict the trend of populist orientations and votes in Italy before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic.Method: Using the Consequences of COVID‐19 (COCO) data set (quota sample of the Italian adult population), we conducted a 3.5‐year, seven‐wave longitudinal study, with one wave before the pandemic (June 2019) and six waves during the pandemic (April and October 2020, April and October 2021, and April and October 2022).Results: Two latent growth analyses have shown that in the period we considered the degree of populism of the party chosen for the vote decreased linearly; this change was positively associated with the anxiety of the participants. Conversely, populist orientations remained stable.Conclusion: The COVID‐19 pandemic plausibly contributed to a superficial and temporary halt to the long populist wave that hit Italy in the last decades, as demonstrated by the decrease in populist vote choices concomitant with a persistent substrate of populist orientations.

It is time to summarize the main idea of this book, namely, that young people’s political interest shapes their political development. We have developed two main hypotheses.

Highlights When adolescents’ values are compared with their parents’ values, the associations are typically low. However, when adolescents are asked to report on their parents’ values, the associations between their own values and their parents’ values are systematically much higher. This chapter tests the idea that adolescents’ and parents’ perceptions of each other’s life values are systematically biased. This bias, or projection, leads adolescents to believe that their parents’ values are close to their own. Parents do the same. They believe that their adolescents’ values are similar to their own. However, the associations between parents’ perceptions of their adolescents’ values and their adolescents’ reported values are small. We propose that a similar perceptual bias affects adolescents’ and parents’ perceptions of their joint political interactions. How often political discussions take place and how politically supportive their parents are is strongly colored by the adolescents’ political interest. Similarly, the frequency of political discussions according to parents and the extent to which parents are politically supportive of the adolescent is strongly colored by parents’ political interest. In reality, there is little agreement between how adolescents and parents perceive their political interactions.

Highlights People can acquire political reputations in different contexts. The first part of the chapter examines the individual characteristics and consequences of psychological group processes in the classroom that lead some students to gain reputations for being politically knowledgeable and verbal—a political reputation in the classroom. Cross-sectional predictions for the 13- and 16-year-olds showed that political interest and internal political efficacy positively predicted classroom political reputation, and social anxiety negatively predicted classroom political reputation for both cohorts. Having a political reputation predicted increased political interest and political efficacy over the course of a year. Mediation analyses showed that students’ political interest and political efficacy significantly influenced political interest and efficacy one year later via political reputation. This suggests that a political reputation in class may function in part as a booster of these students’ initial political interest and efficacy over time. The second part of the chapter examines, in the context of a long-term perspective, the role of students’ political reputation in the classroom on their future political activity. The measure of political reputation in the classroom at age 16 was used to predict participants’ political activity four years later at age 20 and their attempts to take a public stand for a party in that year’s national election. Political reputation in the classroom positively predicted future political activity, membership in political organizations, and attempts to take a public stand for a party in the national election at age 20. The role that political reputation played also depended on other characteristics of these students observed by their classmates (popularity and anger). Mediation analyses showed that students’ political interest and political efficacy at age 16 significantly influenced their political interest and efficacy at age 20 via political reputation. This suggests that political reputation acts in part as a booster of these students’ initial political interest and efficacy over time.

Highlights A common assumption in political socialization research is that parents transmit their political attitudes and values to their offspring. Their views become the views of their children. This is a shaky assumption unless it can be shown that parents’ political values and attitudes are closely linked to the same attitudes and values in their children. Reliance on cross-sectional surveys is of little help in confirming this assumption. This study finds bidirectional, not unidirectional, relationships from ages 13 to 28. Consistent with research from the 1960s and 1970s, we show that parents’ political attitudes and values and perceptions of political interactions with their adolescents do not match adolescents’ attitudes and values and perceptions of joint political interactions with their parents. There is a need to understand the mechanisms that govern adolescents’ perceptions of their political interactions with others and the mechanisms that govern parents’ perceptions of the same interactions. This is because adolescents and parents seem to live in different perceptual worlds when it comes to their views of political attitudes, values, and joint political interactions.

Highlights From mid-adolescence onward, young people with high political interest rarely lose this interest, but in early adolescence high political interest may flicker and disappear. Political interest stabilizes before young adulthood, but there are still fluctuations to consider: Individuals with low political interest may become more interested in politics, but not the most interested, and individuals with average political interest may either lose this interest or become more interested in politics. Characteristics closely related to political interest—interest in society in general, feelings about politics, internal political efficacy, and attention to news—show roughly the same trends over ages as political interest. The age-related changes in feelings about politics are particularly noteworthy. In young adulthood, between the ages of 20 and 26, one in four finds politics fun, one in four finds politics boring, and one in two finds politics neither fun nor boring. This is different from young adolescents (age 13), where two out of three find political issues boring and only 8% find political issues fun. Among several measures of political engagement—importance of being politically active, membership in a civic/political association, offline and online political activity—only online political activity increases with age.

Highlights Projection, a biased perception, explains why adolescents’ and parents’ political interests color their perceptions of their observed common political interactions—the frequency of political discussions and the extent of parents’ political support. It also explains the low accuracy that exists in adolescents’ and parents’ perceptions of their shared political interactions. The lack of shared perceptions of observed behaviors does not preclude adolescents from being open to political socialization attempts by their parents and others. Here, we tested the idea that adolescents’ perceptions of their political interactions with significant others overall are influenced by their own political interests to a greater extent than perceived political interactions influence adolescents’ political interests. The 13- and 16-year-olds were followed for 1 year. We found that adolescents’ perceptions of important others’ (parents, teachers, friends) political views, political interest, political influence and support, and their own susceptibility to others’ political communication were all influenced by their own political interest. These findings suggest that adolescents’ political interest is an input to their political development, making politically interested adolescents active agents in their political interactions with significant others.