The Reciprocal Links Between Exposure to Mediated Role Models’ Political Content and Adolescents’ Political Self-Efficacy

Adolescents’ favorite media actors (e.g., influencers, celebrities or sports stars) are known to share political opinions on their social media accounts amid their entertainment and lifestyle content. Through engaging political posts, these actors have the potential to empower the political self-efficacy beliefs of their (young) audiences, but research on such effects is missing. The effects of political content by mediated role models (short: MRMs) on adolescents’ political self-efficacy may further depend on the source (comparing influencers and celebrities/athletes) and users’ level of elaborate political information processing on social media. However, knowledge of these potential boundary conditions is lacking. A three-wave panel study among 648 French adolescents (Mage = 15.21, SDage = 1.89, 56.6% girls) in 2021-22 addressed these research gaps. The between-person results from the random-intercept cross-lagged panel models showed that higher trait-like levels of exposure to the political content of a favorite role model were significantly related to higher trait-like levels of political self-efficacy. None of the explored reciprocal relationships emerged on the within-person level, and neither the type of role model nor the elaborate processing of political information moderated the relationships.