Protest and Parents

Abstract

In this study, we examine factors assumed to have disposed students to radicalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The data are from a recent retrospective survey of 1,246 former University of Oslo students born between 1940 and 1950. The unprecedented number of radical respondents allows for analyses that could not be done in earlier studies, especially of the extreme left. The results reflect the preponderant influence of parents’ political preferences. Variations in political orientation between different fields of study and between cohorts, with students born towards the end of the 1940s being more radical than students born earlier in the decade, suggest influence by peers, although this is hard to gauge. Urban upbringing is found to be significant, pointing to the possible importance of exposure to radical world-view carriers. Neither gender nor class has significant controlled predictive power. Since most students were men, and students were far more likely to protest than extramural youth, males dominated the protest movement. Students from the working class were more radical than middle-class students, but apparently this was due not to any independent effect of class but to differences in the world-view to which they were exposed at home, manifested in parents’ political preferences.