Parent–Adolescent Political Disagreement and Adolescent Political Development amid Duterte’s Presidency: A Positioning Analysis

Abstract

Despite its significant ramifications on promoting youth political competence, literature has paid little attention to parent–adolescent political disagreement and the relational dynamics underlying the phenomenon. Our study deploys positioning analysis to examine how Filipino adolescents navigate conflict-filled parent–adolescent political discussions, especially those in relation to President Rodrigo Duterte’s leadership. Interview accounts yield three storylines characterizing political disagreement episodes among participants and their parents: a control struggle storyline, a credibility contest storyline and a moral scramble storyline. Each storyline consists of adolescents and parents adopting competing positions to gain discursive advantages related to their developmental, rational or moral standing. They leverage these advantages towards influencing political opinions articulated within the family space. We conclude with a discussion of our findings vis-à-vis the need to reconceptualize political disagreement as a dynamic process, the interface between micro-level parent–adolescent political disagreement and macro-level sociopolitical discourses and the functions political disagreement serves in adolescent development.

Introduction

Political socialization research shows that adolescents’ political discussions with their parents influence their development of key democratic competencies (McIntosh et al., 2007). Conversing with parents on political matters can increase youth intention to participate in political activities (Quintelier, 2013), mitigate civic disengagement among middle- and secondary-schoolers (Wray-Lake & Shubert, 2019) and encourage further political discussions with adolescent peers (Šerek & Umemura, 2015). The significant implications of parent–adolescent political talk on youth political development remain even when the child grows into young adulthood and other socialization agents, such as peers, emerge (Kim & Stattin, 2019). Some explanations for the persistence of these implications are the safe environment for political exploration engendered by the intimate family space (Östman, 2013) and the continued frequency of political communication between parent and child up until adulthood (Kim & Stattin, 2019).

These same factors, however, also make parent–adolescent political discussions a context in which political disagreement—that is, a situation in which an individual is exposed to political viewpoints different from one’s own—arises. Morey et al. (2012) find that the people an individual discusses politics the most constantly with are also those one is likely to articulate disagreement towards. Parents, therefore, are the most probable candidate for adolescents to debate dissonant political perspectives with. Empirical studies agree that such political disagreement within the family is not necessarily a negative development and is, in fact, conducive towards the political socialization process as engagement with individuals who have different political views predicts increased political awareness and opinion formation (Lup, 2010; Scheufele et al., 2006), more nuanced political reasoning (Ekstrom et al., 2019) and greater tolerance for opposing political perspectives (Mutz, 2002a, 2006). McDevitt (2006) even argues that adolescents’ cultivation of political preferences contrary to their parents can shape not only the child but also the parent’s political growth. In a process called trickle-up socialization, novel questions and perspectives brought into the family space by adolescents can lead to parent and child reciprocally contributing to the development of each other’s political identities—with the child working to progressively gain political autonomy and the parent seeking to maintain authority by constantly matching the child’s growing civic competence (Hooghe & Stiers, 2020; McDevitt & Chaffee, 2002).

Despite its potentially significant ramifications on promoting adolescent political competence, literature has paid relatively little attention to disagreement in political discussions between youth and their parents (for an exception, see Levinsen & Yndigegn, 2015). Empirical work in the field largely consists of quantitative studies focused on political disagreement’s relation with political characteristics and outcomes at the level of the individual and fails to explore an account of the phenomenon as an interpersonal event experienced in the context of intimate social relationships, where factors such as trust, cultural norms, relationship maintenance and power dynamics operate (Eveland et al., 2011). McDevitt and Chaffee (2002) argue, however, that familial political socialization processes, such as parents and adolescents negotiating disagreement, should be analysed not only as individual phenomena but also as aspects of a dynamic social system where multiple interacting elements (e.g. the parent, the child, their communication patterns and their cultural context) affect the family’s political development. Andersson (2015) further elaborates that research should begin to investigate how actions made by young citizens, as active agents in their own political socialization, shape the political situations (e.g. political disagreement) and institutions (e.g. family) they find themselves in.

Our objective in this paper, therefore, is to contribute to the limited body of political disagreement scholarship that consciously considers the relational dynamics underlying the phenomenon. Our study deploys qualitative methods grounded on positioning theory—a framework for examining moment-to-moment interpersonal dynamics in a given social episode—to analyse how Filipino youth navigate conflict-filled political discussions with their parents, especially those in relation to the leadership of President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine president at the time of our data collection. Our use of qualitative methods provides ‘rich insights into the phenomenology of actual political talking’ (Schmitt-Beck & Lup, 2013, p. 530) and uncovers the interpersonal aspects of within-family youth political socialization that have been mostly neglected in the literature (Eveland et al., 2011). Furthermore, our choice of positioning theory as a hermeneutic approach also allows us to leverage its sensitivity to cultural narratives in investigating how political disagreement transpires amid the contextually specific social discourses found within the Philippines, a social and democratic milieu markedly different from the American and European settings dominating research on the matter (Harré & Moghaddam, 2003; Mancosu & Hopmann, 2019).

Polarization Around Duterte

Having won the Philippine presidency in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte has since generated a polarized political environment where supporters and critics vehemently argue against and oftentimes harass each other (Untalan, 2017). Support for Duterte arose from his depiction of a country-in-crisis narrative that resonated with the anxieties and frustrations of Filipinos across all social classes (Arguelles, 2019; Curato, 2016). Duterte’s followers therefore accept the need for his decisive and, at times, morally and legally questionable actions against those who he claims threaten the Filipino people’s security and prosperity—i.e. petty criminals, drug pushers, communists and the corrupt incompetent elite from the nation’s capital supposedly enabling and benefiting from these delinquents’ proliferation (Arguelles, 2019; Webb & Curato, 2018).

Duterte’s detractors, meanwhile, seem to be growing in number and diversity as his government’s actions and policies draw increasing criticism for violating human rights and failing to deliver campaign promises (Curato, 2018; Dressel & Bonoan, 2019). His war against drugs has received backlash for being unable to address the country’s narcotics problem despite resulting in the extrajudicial killing of 12,000 lives (Human Rights Watch, 2018). Defiant trends constantly circulate in social media to express indignation over Duterte’s supposed use of the country’s legal and political institutions to consolidate his grip on power (Dressel & Bonoan, 2019). Such a dynamic atmosphere of political polarization can thus engender valuable insights regarding the implications of parent–adolescent political disagreement on political socialization.

Positioning Theory and Political Disagreement

Located within the social constructionist paradigm, positioning theory argues that people’s behaviours, cognitions and sense of identity can be explained by their perception of what rights, duties and positions they have in particular social episodes (Kayi-Aydar, 2019). Thus, understanding human action entails analysing the speech and communication acts involved in the dynamic, moment-to-moment distribution and negotiation of rights and duties among social actors participating in (an) interaction/s being examined. To guide this analysis, positioning theory offers a ‘positioning triangle’ as a hermeneutic framework to which recollections and/or direct documentations of conversations and other similar social encounters can be subjected. This triangle is comprised of positions, speech acts and storylines.

Positions denote what social actors must say/do for their co-interlocutors (duties) and what their co-interlocutors must say/do for them (rights) (Harré, 2012). Positions are actively and progressively distributed throughout a social episode via positioning moves—discursive, social-cognitive processes which social actors use to assign, resist and take up rights and duties, and which are contingent on the individual attributes and histories of the interlocutors involved, the power dynamics at play in their relationship and the historical–cultural context they are situated in. Positioning moves are primarily accomplished through speech acts—intentional performances (e.g. talk or gestures) which dialoguing participants can similarly or differentially ascribe meanings to. The disjoint speech acts social actors perform within a developing social episode and the positions they create through these acts are made coherent and meaningful by the storyline/s unfolding in said episode. Storylines are conventionally established and culturally entrenched narrative structures that can be used to organize, interpret and explain a sequence of acts vis-à-vis the locally prevalent moral order.

With its value having already been substantially demonstrated in conflict research, political scholarship and family studies (Ghosten, 2012), positioning theory is particularly apt for analysing parent–adolescent political disagreement among adolescents and their parents. Harré and Slocum (2003) argue that disagreements arise because of one of two conditions: either (i) the opponents are interpreting one social encounter using two completely incompatible storylines, each of which is unfathomed by the rival party, or (ii) the opponents share one consistent storyline but are taking up diametrically opposite positions within this single narrative. Analysing conflict, then, requires considering the storylines, positions and speech acts adopted by the dissenting social actors.

We, therefore, use positioning theory in this study as a framework to unearth the hitherto unexamined relational dynamics operating within parent–adolescent political disagreements and the implications that context—i.e. the polarized political climate around Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte—has on these dynamics. Specifically, we aim to answer the question: What positions, storylines and speech acts emerge in Filipino adolescents’ narratives of political disagreement with their parents as they live amid the Duterte presidency?

Method

Participants

We purposively sampled Filipino adolescents who self-identified as actively experiencing political disagreement with their parents at the time of data collection. Our participant recruitment strategies included corresponding with politically active youth organizations for referrals and asking participants to recommend other individuals who fit our sampling criteria. Potential participants were then asked to briefly describe via e-mail the nature of their political disagreement with their parents before being formally recruited to the study. These methods yielded a sample of seven participants, six female and one male, aged 17 to 21 years old. As with previous positioning studies that employed a similar or fewer number of participants (e.g. Ghosten, 2012; Mussolino et al., 2019; Sabat, 2010), our sample size allowed us to not only explore diverse perspectives on the experience of parent–adolescent political disagreement but also analyse each participant account with depth of detail.

Of the seven participants, two came from the Philippines’s National Capital Region, two from provinces north of the capital and three from the Visayas—a known Duterte bailiwick (Maboloc, 2017). Six of the seven participants disapproved of Duterte’s politics and governance and ran into conflict with parents and relatives who supported the populist president, while only one expressed approval for Duterte and disagreed with a parent who opposed the president’s administration. Despite our participants’ mostly negative opinion of Duterte, we determined that their accounts were still appropriate for addressing our research question as the focus of our analysis was on the dynamics and processes underlying their disagreement with their parents, not the content of their and their families’ political opinions.

Data Collection

Acknowledging the close relationship between positioning theory and narratology (Harré, 2012), we followed a narrative data collection approach which allowed participants to construct their own ‘accounts of connected events’ by recounting ‘changes that occur over a period of time’ and that ‘involve a number of different characters and some form of action’ (Howitt, 2016, pp. 365–366). Specifically, we used semi-structured interviews to gather episodic narratives about critical social encounters ranging from the time participants first developed political opinions contrary to their parents’ until the most recent manifestations of political disagreement within their families. A protocol was prepared to guide the interviews but was structured to be open-ended and flexible to enable the adolescents to engage in fluid storytelling and to encourage them to be as detailed as possible in their reflections and their verbatim recollections of pertinent disagreement episodes with their parents.

Data collection took place at times and locations convenient to our participants and was subject to the written informed consent of all participants and of the parents of participants below 18 years old. Each face-to-face interview was audio-recorded and lasted for one to two hours. Data gathered were then transcribed, anonymized and kept confidential in password-protected devices.

Data Analysis

Harré and Moghaddam (2003) state that positioning analysis can begin at any vertex of the positioning triad. In choosing which vertex to initiate our analysis with, we considered Harré and Slocum’s (2003) contention that conflicts emerge from either (i) the opponents following two entirely unbridgeable positioning triads or (ii) their adoption of antagonistic but still related positions and character attributions that exist within a shared storyline. Thus, in order to discern the degree of contradiction/relatedness in ‘the underlying presumptions that sustain misunderstandings and [political] conflict’ (Harré & Slocum, 2003, p. 100) among our adolescent participants and their families, we first opted to examine what differences there were in the character attributions and positions they adopted and to determine whether these could become linked by a ‘discursive bridge’. Upon accomplishing this stage of our analysis, we found that although political disagreement episodes narrated by the adolescents showed how they and their parents made opposing attributions and took up contrary positions, it was still possible to embed these attributions and positions within storylines that were shared by both parties (indicating that a ‘discursive bridge’ could be drawn and that the second of the two conditions outlined above applied to our participants’ situations).

The next step then entailed identifying what major storylines structured the narrative characters’ competing positions and gave meaning to the speech acts they undertook. These storylines became key to not only illuminating the relational dynamics that underlay our participants’ experience of parent–adolescent political disagreement but also locating these experiences within broader political narratives and moral and cultural conventions. The final stage of the analysis involved scrutinizing relevant speech acts with respect to the different meanings they gained and produced vis-à-vis the storylines and positions we found within the narratives. During this phase, we paid specific attention to how each party’s expression of dissident political opinions received varying subjective interpretations depending on the storyline or position a character employed. We detail our resulting analysis in the next section.

Results and Analysis

Three storylines emerged to characterize the interpersonal dynamics that operate during participants’ conflict-laden political discussions with their parents: political disagreement as (i) a control struggle, (ii) a credibility contest and (iii) a moral scramble. In any given disagreement episode, adolescents and their parents move fluidly across these storylines, with control struggle being the central narrative which its sibling narratives arise from and feedback to. In particular, each storyline consisted of adolescents and parents adopting competing positions in order to gain discursive advantages related to their developmental, rational or moral standing and leverage these towards controlling or influencing what political opinions are articulated within the family space.

A Struggle for Control

Recalling the first time they expressed dissidence towards their parents’ political viewpoints, most participants narrated how their dissent was viewed as much more than a simple expression of political opinion. The response Lyla received from her mother typifies:

She gets annoyed at me because she doesn’t like being contradicted… When I started having these opinions, she was mad and said ‘Why has it turned out like this? You’ve always been so obedient!’ So when the topic is politics and I speak, she’d go, ‘Don’t interrupt. This is adult talk,’ and ignore me because I’m seen as the family’s baby.

Lyla’s simple act of political opining was immediately construed by her mother as a challenge to the blanket authority the parent has always unquestionably had prior to the adolescent’s expression of disagreement. Such an interpretation signified the mother’s entry into a control struggle storyline, in which the parents’ primary goal is to resist what they perceive is the adolescent’s attempt to influence the family unit’s overall political stand and maintain leadership over it. To this end, Lyla’s mother—like most of the other participants’ parents—positions the adolescent as young and developmentally immature to strip her of the right to participate in political talk and impose upon her a duty of silence and subservience to the adults who supposedly know best.

Age is not the sole indicator of the adolescents’ assumed developmental inferiority that parents use against their children within the control struggle storyline. Other parents would flaunt the financial, socioemotional and moral support they provide their children to emphasize the adolescents’ overreliance on them and unworthiness to freely form and express political opinions. Gladys shares:

Sometimes, they threaten to cut off your allowance… With my mother, ‘Watch out, I might make you stay home because of your stubbornness!’… Once, when I changed my profile picture as a sign of protest, they asked, ‘Why is your pic like that? Remove that. Remove all your posts! Why are you being anti when we didn’t raise you like that?… We are supporters; think what our friends would say with our daughter being like this.’

Here, Gladys’s parents highlight her economic dependency on them as a basis to position themselves as authorities with the power and right to utilize outright commands and threats to gatekeep their daughter’s political protestations.

The adolescents, however, refused to capitulate to the deferential positioning their parents inflicted upon them, as shown by Lyla:

Since they’re not used to their wills being defied, they get offended when I try to reason with them… especially my mom who’s really controlling and whose mind is really hard to change … She thinks whatever she wants should go… so, I simply flush out what they say and try to forget that we even had a fight, so that I can maintain the strength of my beliefs.

In this extract, we see Lyla invalidating the authority her parents assume automatically belongs to them by positioning them as excessively sensitive. And under this positioning, Lyla’s parents, who can neither reasonably nor respectfully discourse with her, lose the right to be given due acknowledgement by the adolescent and allow themselves to simply be ignored by her as she does so in an effort to stand by her principles.

Lyla’s resistant reaction to her parents’ authoritarian positioning exemplifies how the adolescent participants accepted and participated in the control struggle storyline their parents initiated, but only to offer their own competing position of how rights and authority must be distributed within the political-discourse realm of the family space. To this end, some adolescents, like Charlie, did more than just reject the initial positionings their parents adopted:

Mom and my dad would get into an argument too… and of course, I’d be joining them as well… I just like to talk about the government with them—the politics and everything… They will never agree, but they will come to a point where they will understand what I’m talking about,… where I’m coming from.

The political arguments described above often begin with Charlie’s parents as the sole participants, thus implicitly positioning themselves as the only ones with the authority and right to discuss such matters; however, the adolescent is quick to not only decline this position but also propose an entirely new one: an egalitarian positioning in which he takes as granted his right to be his parents’ political conversation peer and their mutual duty to respect one another’s contradictory political perspectives.

As the adolescents grew more confident in their political views, their participation in the control struggle storyline grew more proactive and went beyond simply minimizing their parents’ presumed authority or positioning themselves as their parents’ equals. Amy is an example:

I feel more adult because I no longer just follow my parents’ viewpoints… Now I’m more independent, my opinions are not just from them solely, but from a lot of people,… my own research, my interpretation of what’s happening around the world… And me being more expressive over matters my parents would disagree on—it’s not that I’m rebelling; it’s just me drawing a line between my political views and theirs.

Amy performs a complete disavowal of the submissive positioning she previously occupied and proceeds to position herself autonomously—as someone with the right to delineate her political outlooks from those of her parents and to share these unrestrainedly in the family space. Within this autonomous positioning, the adolescent’s expression of political disagreement is interpreted not as a threat to the parent’s authority but as a rite of passage, in which the adolescent begins to negotiate co-equal control in shaping parent–adolescent political discussions but still respects the parent’s seniority, thereby acting with an individualistic orientation (Oyserman et al., 2002) while still complying with the precepts of Philippine society’s dominant collectivistic moral order. Such an unequivocal engagement by the adolescents of the control struggle storyline that the parents also continue to uphold creates an opening for two other storylines to develop as a way for both parties to vie for influence of the family’s political direction.

A Contest of Credibility

One approach parents employed to undermine the participants’ claim to autonomy was to dispute the soundness and validity of the latter’s political opinions by pointing out that the adolescents’ lack of practical experience prevented their sentiments from being grounded on the ‘real world’. The reasoning used by Amy’s and Gladys’s parents manifests this:

They would say, ‘You don’t get it because you don’t know the reality… you’ve always lived a sheltered life.’ (Amy)

They get aggressive so they can boast they’re correct… The typical script is ‘Were you alive then, during that time? Because we were, we saw how things were!’ (Gladys)

Drawing from an adults-know-best narrative, the parents position themselves as being older and more experienced and, in the process, grant themselves the right to wield their accumulated wisdom in dictating the family’s dominant political attitude. Corollary to this discursive manoeuvre is the simultaneous positioning of the adolescents as naïve juveniles who are oblivious to the ways of the world and whose judgements consequently lack merit and credibility, thus making them duty-bound to acquiesce to their parents’ more informed opinions.

The adolescents, however, were reluctant to accept their parents’ ‘with age comes wisdom’ assumption, with one—Loraine—arguing that age made her parents complacent and unable to open themselves to new information and perspectives:

Our conversations just go in circles, with them echoing redundant arguments. And yes, they might hear what I’m saying, but I know none of it’s going into their heads… They never want to know more about the why or the how. They’re content with knowing things as is, and they don’t want to think critically about it… And I guess because they don’t access this information, they end up becoming blind followers.

Loraine offers a position contrary to that adopted by parents like Amy’s and Gladys’s—it is not the child who should be positioned as deficient in credibility but rather the parents, who have become too self-satisfied with their supposedly large knowledge and experience base and who are thus unwilling to expand this by learning from their children. As parents repeatedly turn to their age and experience as pretext for preserving their control over the family’s political discussions, the adolescents position them as ‘blind followers’ who have grown overly content with their status quo and who thus fail to think critically about new realities. In the adolescents’ eyes, therefore, the parents’ stagnant and arguably backward-oriented mindset negates their right to further prescribe what political sentiments are un/permitted in the family space, allowing room for the adolescents to develop and express their own independent beliefs. Through this counter-positioning, the adolescent effectively transforms the parent’s adults-know-best narrative into a more balanced credibility contest storyline, wherein both parties compete for rational superiority and the associated right of prevailing in the control struggle storyline described above.

In this contest of credibility, the adolescents rely on the academic experience they received from university to position themselves positively in the conflict storyline. Gladys narrates:

University allowed me to realize that… although we prospered in Tacloban during martial law, the case wasn’t the same in Manila or Luzon. Through professors I interviewed—one of whom was really an activist—through books I read, and the many journal accounts and documentary films with my classes, I realized, ‘Oh, a lot of things happened. Things aren’t as simple as I think.’ The rallies were also eye-openers, so it was really through university… that I saw how history really is.

By focusing on the impact her education had on her political development, Gladys positions herself as an enlightened intellectual who was able to expand her perspective beyond the presuppositions she grew up with. Such a position implicitly confers upon her the duty to remain open to novel ways of thinking and to keep learning about ‘how history really is’. This openness to engage new and divergent opinions is a significant aspect of the self-positioning the participants undertook to elevate their credibility, as demonstrated by Danielle: ‘I’m now more mature… with all those conflicts, I’m able to further strengthen my commitment to the side I choose… It’s like, if your belief doesn’t get tested, it won’t be credible enough.’ Following Danielle’s reasoning, the adolescent’s claim to credibility and maturity emanates from her intentional encounters with different viewpoints and her very participation in political conflict with her family and other individuals. In this sense, the adolescent’s expression of disagreement in the family no longer just questions the parent’s age- and experience-based credibility but also bolsters the self’s rational position—one that is based on actively partaking in political discourse. There thus exists a mutually reinforcing relationship among the adolescent’s positioning as credible, her right and duty to express disagreement, and the very act of expressing this disagreement: the more the adolescent debates and exchanges ideas with her parents, the better her claim to credibility is; the more credible the adolescent is, the more confidently she can (and should) participate in parent–adolescent debates.

The tension between the adolescents’ and parents’ varying positions on who is more credible and who should learn from and listen to whom reveals that the credibility contest storyline is also essentially a teacher–student narrative being interpreted differently by both parties. Further analysis would divulge that the disparity in interpretation can be explained by the opposing cultural orientations the two sides inclined towards. On the one hand, the parents’ aversion to being questioned by their children and their emphasis on the importance of personal wisdom transference in forming beliefs indicate collectivistic expectations of how teacher–student interaction and knowledge acquisition should be (Bista, 2015; Hofstede, 1986). Meanwhile, the adolescents’ regard for independent academic investigation and open political confrontation stem from an individualistic approach to creating and refining opinions (Hofstede, 1986; Slater & Inagawa, 2019). This contrast in the epistemological values that inform the adolescents’ and parents’ opposite positions in the credibility contest/teacher–student storyline can be observed in Agnes’s reflection:

I always want my facts straight. My experience of political conflict has pressured me to always fact-check myself. Especially because I saw the parents I always used to follow, especially my dad, suddenly became the source of illogical fallacies… So now, with my dad, when he tells a story about a controversial historical moment, I no longer immediately believe what he says.

Pertinent here is the father’s habitual storytelling of controversial historical moments—a speech act in which he implicitly positions himself as a credible teacher who must transfer his experience-based knowledge of politico-historical matters to his daughter, who in turn must accept this knowledge willingly. Agnes, however, questions the epistemological soundness of the collectivistic demand of simply deriving her knowledge from the tales of her father, who she alleges has been consistently parroting illogical fallacies; she thus adopts a more individualism-aligned and academic attitude in establishing her position as a credible student within the teacher–student narrative—by acknowledging her duty to constantly check her facts, Agnes positions her opinions and knowledge as being more sound in basis than her parents’. In essence, therefore, the credibility contest storyline is also a competition about which epistemological values—collectivistic or individualistic—should influence the familial political discussion space.

A Scramble Towards Moral Ascendancy

Among the participants’ parents, advancing their position in the control struggle storyline also involved disparaging the ethicality of the adolescent’s political opinion-formation process. Amy’s parents, who hail from a province in the Visayas, illustrate use of this strategy:

They tell me, ‘You’re like that because of imperialist Manila… if you stayed here in our province, you wouldn’t become like that…’ So my parents think this kind of thinking, this kind of ideology, it’s forced on me—that it’s not something I wanted to believe, but since I’m here, I’ve come to believe it.

In arguing with Amy, her parents invoke ‘imperialist Manila’—a term used by provincial Filipinos to refer to the elite snobbery they perceive from residents of the country’s capital (Martínez, 2004)—as a malevolent external force that has taken their daughter hostage and corrupted her with sentiments that are elitist and malicious towards Duterte and the non-urban regional identity the family shares with him. With this, the adolescent is positioned as having been morally contaminated against her will, thereby automatically framing her political opinions as being a result not of an independent thought process but of undue outside pressure and rendering these viewpoints invalid and ineligible to be articulated in the family space. Such a positioning manoeuvre also effectively erases the adolescent’s right to influence the family’s political direction and confers the parents with the duty to ‘purify’ their child and save her from moral decay, giving them additional reason to continue arguing with the adolescent and insist on their authoritarian position.

The parents’ positioning, however, is in stark contrast with how the adolescents view themselves. A point Charlie made while debating with his father expounds on this:

I argued, ‘Papa, it’s not like that. If it was really like that, a lot of people would suffer… At the end of the day, the richer man gets the say… while the people he has harmed, they’re still suffering.’

Through this contention, the adolescent tacitly displays his awareness of the social injustices that beleaguer the country and effectively positions himself as fighting against, rather than for, the privileged class. Moreover, he simultaneously reclaims his ethical standing as someone who can consider and empathize with the plight of the oppressed. This positioning, adopted by other participants as well, then allows the adolescent to further claim moral rectitude by additionally positioning the self as a principled hero accorded with the duty to work towards the liberation of the disadvantaged and the betterment of the nation. Gladys is a representative case:

The rally was really when I leveled up to the point of ‘I will go against my parents, I will defy, and I will protect. I will stand with what I believe in’… That affirmed my nationalistic vibes, and I thought ‘Oh, I’m capable of doing something like this… oh, I want to do it again!… For the country, to show what Duterte’s doing isn’t right…’ So that’s one thing that’s very important when it comes to having a political stand—the purpose, the solidarity… That will help spread the belief.

Gladys’s heroic positioning in this extract thoroughly transforms the adolescent’s expression of political defiance against her parents from a mere communication of dissent into the noble fulfilment of a moral imperative to stand in solidarity with the underprivileged and uphold and advance the patriotic cause of ‘protecting’ the nation from Duterte’s supposed villainy. Thus, defending her political principles from her parents becomes not just a right but also a responsibility the adolescent must dutifully abide by.

The parents’ self-positioning as the adolescents’ saviours and the adolescents’ self-positioning as the country’s heroes are constitutive of a third storyline: a scramble for moral ascendancy, in which both sides call upon broader sociopolitical discourses to glorify the self and vilify the opposing party so as to justify their own expression of political disagreement and claim victory in the control struggle storyline. It is this moral scramble storyline that embeds and bridges the internal storylines and dynamics operating within the participants’ families to the larger narratives that shape Philippine society’s polarized attitudes towards the Duterte administration. Specifically, the parents’ and adolescents’ contradictory positions seem to be founded respectively on the opposite discourses endorsed and propagated by Duterte’s supporters and detractors—whereas the parents’ accusation of elitism-instigated moral degradation against the adolescents align well with the ‘corrupt, incompetent elites as national threats’ narrative that Duterte’s followers embrace (Webb & Curato, 2018), the adolescents’ initiative to supposedly save the Philippines and its oppressed classes from Duterte corresponds to how the president’s critics portray him as a power-hungry tyrant with a wanton disregard for the rights of the opposition and the masses (Dressel & Bonoan, 2019).

This dissonance in the sociopolitical narratives assumed by the participants and their parents also explains their contrasting attitudes towards political participation. The following participant recollections elucidate:

My parents get mad because they think, ‘There’s nothing you can do even if you join those protest rallies. And what if you die? What if you get bombed?’ (Lyla)

I was surprised at how willing my dad was to set aside the fate of the majority for the sake of a few… because that’s essentially what you’re doing when you’re turning a blind eye to what’s happening just because it’s not affecting you or your friends. Now I know he’s willing to let some things as huge as these slide, I feel ‘Oh, he isn’t as nice as I thought.’ I came to realize what his values were, that in a way, he’s actually self-preserving—he would prioritize himself over others. (Loraine)

Here, the parents’ focus on personal security and the welfare of those within their sphere of influence suggest a pragmatic approach to choosing what causes to fight for, while the adolescents’ refusal to turn a blind eye on patent abuses and their desire to speak up against these hint at their political idealism. We propose that these dissimilar philosophies can be contextualized by the opposite sociopolitical narratives adopted by the two parties: believing the powerful elite to be the root of a Philippines in crisis, parents feel that nothing can be accomplished by mere ordinary citizens like them to combat such influential enemies and thus simply choose to pragmatically concentrate on the interests of those within their loci of control (i.e. their families and friends); meanwhile, the adolescents, acting under a rights-centric and arguably Marxist interpretation of the national situation, idealistically exercise their freedoms of assembly and expression to protest against the Duterte government and stand in solidarity with the marginalized. Within the preceding analysis therefore, the moral scramble storyline becomes a battleground both for which sociopolitical narrative stays and dominates in the family discussion space and what level of influence the adolescent and parent will have in determining this.

Discussion

Our study used positioning theory to identify the discursive movements that occurred between Filipino adolescents and their parents as they engaged in conflict-filled political talk. In so doing, we not only advanced Moghaddam and Harré’s (2010) goal ‘to gather new ideas for … applying positioning analysis to political processes’, including ones that ‘shape the micropolitics of a family’ (pp. 2–3), but also answered previous scholars’ calls for a qualitative study investigating the content of intensive parent–adolescent political discussions that result from the sudden political development of adolescents (Hooghe & Stiers, 2020; McDevitt & Chaffee, 2002). We now explicate on our paper’s contributions to by discussing points: (i) the need to reconceptualize parent–adolescent political disagreement as a dynamic process, (ii) the interface between micro-level parent–adolescent political disagreement and macro-level sociopolitical discourses and (iii) the functions political disagreement serves in adolescent development. We then end with a brief outline of the study’s limitations and areas future research can explore.

Examining participant recollections uncovered the series of positioning moves and countermoves that parents and adolescents employed to establish themselves as developmentally, rationally and morally deserving of having increased influence in the family’s political discussion space. Such characterization of political disagreement—that is, as an active, interpersonal exchange among opposing parties—is largely absent from scholarship on the matter as the construct is often conceived as a static variable that can be measured at the level of the individual depending on the perceived frequency and intensity of exposure to and expression of disagreement (e.g. Ekstrom et al., 2019; Morey et al., 2012), or the self-observed degree of political in/congruity in one’s personal network (e.g. Bello, 2012; Mutz, 2002b). Political communication theorists argue, however, that in a field of study interested in an inherently relational concept such as political disagreement, focusing on only the individual as the unit of analysis and on respondent self-measurement as the primary data source places limits on acquiring a nuanced understanding of the phenomenon (Eveland et al., 2011; McDevitt & Chaffee, 2002). Our findings’ revelation of the implications relational goals has on the progression of political disagreement confirms this argument and points to a need to further explore the theoretical insights that can be gained from expanding literature’s conception of political disagreement as not just a fixed, quantifiable characteristic that can be found in individuals’ private minds but also a dynamic process that is actively shared and negotiated among two or more interacting parties. Our study presents one of the first forays into this novel direction, and we propose that continued pursuit of this broadening of political disagreement literature will make research into the concept more suitable to other qualitative frameworks (e.g. phenomenological analysis and critical discourse analysis) and yield a depth of analysis akin to the that which our use of positioning theory afforded us.

Another important aspect of our results concerns how political disagreement arises from parents and adolescents working with assumptions and positions derived from contradictory cultural and sociopolitical discourses. This insight lends further credence to the above contention that parent–adolescent political disagreement as a phenomenon manifests not as an attribute isolated to each individual but as a process that also interfaces with various facets of broader society. The idea also aligns with Moghaddam and Harré’s (2010) claim that the mutual denial of rights and duties typical of most political conflicts may often be traced to differences in the local moral orders under which the antagonistic parties operate. In our participants’ case, two sets of competing macro-level discourses relevant to the Philippine context seeped into the micro-dynamics of political disagreement within the adolescents’ families.

First is the tension between collectivistic and individualistic mindsets most evident in the credibility contest storyline, wherein the collectivistically oriented parents and individualistically oriented adolescents had mismatched standards for establishing credibility and judging rationality due to their opposite mentalities. This finding is especially interesting because we did not expect to encounter it in a dominantly collectivistic culture such as the Philippines and because past research has shown that in familistic contexts, individuals—rather than being adversarial—are instead more likely to be politically influenced by their strongest ties (Mancosu & Hopmann, 2019). We surmise, however, that the emergence of the individualism-collectivism tension within our participants’ political disagreement experiences may be, in part, due to the ‘growing individualism’ social scientists have detected in multiple cultures across the globe (Myers & Twenge, 2013, p. 40). This suggests the need for future studies to explore how changing values and orientations are impacting political communication and adolescent socialization in evolving cultures.

The second set of macro-level discourses consists of the differing national crisis narratives that Duterte’s supporters and critics respectively adopted. These narratives had implications on the participants’ moral scramble storyline, in which the parents’ and adolescents’ conflicting moral attributions depended on who the villain was (the corrupt elite or the tyrannical Duterte administration) in the crisis narrative they assumed. With past research having shown that internal moral justifications significantly shape the type and level of civic activities (e.g. protesting, voting and volunteering) adolescents engage in (Alvis & Metzger, 2020; Metzger & Smetana, 2009), our results suggest that discourses propagated within the adolescents’ immediate social circles influence not only their manner of moral and civic reasoning but also the breadth and depth of political engagement that emanates from this. It must be noted at this point, however, that the relation between macro-level narratives and micro-level storylines might not be as one-way as we have thus far depicted it—i.e. with only the macro shaping the micro. Political communication literature asserts that everyday political talking also enables the private domain occupied by most ordinary citizens to influence the top-level decision-making performed in formal public institutions (Schmitt-Beck & Lup, 2013). This suggests that the unfolding of political disagreement between parents and adolescents may also possibly have significant ramifications on what sociopolitical narratives will dominate and dictate the public sphere, thereby pointing to the potentially bidirectional interface between the macro and the micro as a topic to be explored in future research.

Our final discussion point relates to the functions that political disagreement serves for adolescent development. Researchers concur that exposure to and engagement in political disagreement contributes to an individual’s acquisition of political deliberation competencies; indeed, encounters with heterogeneous perspectives stimulate self-initiated interrogations of one’s own political motivations and opinions and lead to increased tolerance for divergent viewpoints (Schmitt-Beck & Lup, 2013). Similar effects were found among our participants, all of whom reflected on how their experiences of political disagreement heightened their political knowledge, sophistication and inclusivity. Aside from gains in political and deliberative proficiency, however, our results yielded another relatively less explored benefit of participating in parent–adolescent political disagreement: the findings’ overarching control struggle storyline demonstrates the key role political disagreements played in the development of the adolescents’ autonomy and their gradual emancipation from their parents. Specifically, the control–struggle elements of the political disagreement episodes allowed the adolescents to set boundaries that helped them balance standing by their personal beliefs and maintaining respectful and cordial (and if possible, intimate) relations within the family. Given the twofold deliberative and developmental functions that conflict-laden political talk serves, we conclude that parent–adolescent political disagreements belong to that category of political conflicts that do not need resolution because they are ‘necessary to [create, sustain, and] intensify … in the interest of the greater good’ (Moghaddam & Harré, 2010, p. 6)—the greater good being the political advancement of societies and the maturation of adolescents and their families.

To close, we would like to outline two of the study’s limitations that future research into the matter can explore. The first concerns the gender profile of our adolescent participants as most of them were female, with only one being male. Past research has shown that the genders of both parent and adolescent factor into how discussions of political disagreement play out within the family (Levinsen & Yndigegn, 2015). As such, the narratives of our mostly female sample may not have been able to fully capture nuances in political disagreement episodes in families with male adolescents. The second limitation relates to the fact that the adolescents’ parents were not interviewed for this study, thereby limiting the parental perspective that could have enriched this paper’s analysis of positions within the family. Future studies could thus consider juxtaposing adolescent narratives with parent narratives of political disagreement or analysing recordings and transcripts of political disagreement conversations between parents and adolescents.