Search

The questions discussed in this paper are the following: how many activists are there and how are they organized? What are their distinctive values and ideologies? What are the main patterns of recruitment at the present time and why? What impact do young activists have on the policies and prospects of the parties they support? For answers to these questions, the information is drawn as provided by the parties and other political organizations themselves and on the results of the pilot inquiry of a large study of political activists now in progress. Three preliminary points may be noted. First, that the energies of young activists are concentrated in and around the three parliamentary parties. There is no important political action by the young outside this framework. Young people have participated in two major efforts to escape from or change the existing structure of political organization in the last decade-the New Left and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament-both have failed. Secondly, the parties have made serious efforts to appeal to the young only in periods of electoral adversity-the Liberals before 1905 and since 1955, the Conservatives after 1906 and again after 1946, the Labour Party in the 1930s and since 1959. One might infer from this that there is no substantial rapport between any of the parties and youth perceived as a distinct generation with peculiar values and interests. Thirdly, at the time of writing youth is withdrawing from political activity. The membership of each of the party youth organizations is declining.

The article announces the international contest entitled "The Social and Political Thought of Luigi Sturzo" by the Luigi Sturzo Institute in Rome. A sum of four million Italian lire will be awarded to the best paper and it will be published in a journal. Interested students of any nationality may compete and submit their works written either in Italian, English, French or German. The submitted piece must bear the author's identification or pseudonym on the title page and must be sealed in an envelope containing its full name and address. All entries must reach the secretariat office in five typewritten copies not later than June 30, 1969.

This article focuses on public attitudes toward the criminal justice system. Studies which investigate public attitudes toward the criminal justice system are concerned primarily with the level of public support enjoyed by the programs, actors, and institutions of the legal system. These attitudes and levels of support may have profound implications for public policies in these areas. The research findings suggest that public evaluation of criminal justice institutions is based on rational perceptions of performance from a uniquely individual perspective.

This article presents views of several activists on the question of training in social psychology. The authors have earned the grateful applause of the discipline by posing a critical problem--the need for immediate training of "social clinicians" and "problem-centered generalists" in psychology departments--and a set of solutions to the problem--graduate-student recruitment, curriculum reform, and field work. The fundamental difficulty with the Sanford-Krech proposal is this: their conception of psychology's part in the diagnosis and remediation of social illness and irrelevancy involves the creation of a professional program of specialists to deal with problems which are partly the result of professionalization and specialization. Sanford and Krech propose criteria for graduate student selection which all psychology departments should endorse immediately--but for survival of the discipline, not for a missionary task. While psychology departments would be greatly enriched by this new breed of student, it is not clear that a graduate program is the optimal way of serving either the student or society.

The article studies the determinants of union actions. The labor movement is a loosely organized social movement operating over a very wide range, expressing new conceptions of the worker's position in society. It is the labor movement which shapes the images of working class solidarity and civil rights. Trade unions, on the other hand, concentrate on reaching short-run goals in the immediate situation and show little interest in ideology and broad social reform. A cross-classification of the formal and working arrangements shows that only one-half of the thirty-four unions regularly both proclaim and practice full equality in the organization of workers.

The larger movement for racial equality in the United States has experienced considerable structural and ideological differentiation in the past decade, largely as a consequence of disagreement over tactics to be employed. Two direct-action sub-movements, the southern sit-ins and the urban riots, best illustrate the divergence with the former committed to tactical nonviolence and the latter to violent means of effecting social change. To regain the momentum lost through this differentiation, certain leaders must reorganize a major part of the black population around a tactical approach that acknowledges both the peculiar needs and temper of the potential protestors, and the nature and tolerance level of the system it seeks to change. Responding to these criteria, the approach may develop in the form of an extremely militant but basically nonviolent tactic of social disruption, combining all but the most violent techniques used to date by equal rights activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study began as a study of attitudes toward the war in Vietnam and self-reported plans for military service. The burgeoning literature on sociopolitical activism has produced a very consistent portrait of student activists concerned with such issues as peace, civil rights, the selective service system, and free speech. Activists are more often nonreligious, though a disproportionate number have Jewish parents. Academically, activists tend to be more intellectually oriented and better students than control populations. Other studies have suggested that distinctive levels of moral reasoning, socialization experiences, and perceptions of both parents and self characterize activists. The basic hypothesis underlying this study is that the relationship between private attitudes and public actions that in some sense express or implement these attitudes is far more complex than has been commonly recognized.

Some of the most solidly researched and validated findings in the social sciences relate to the differential participation of men and women in political activities of all kinds from voting and membership of parties, to interest in politics and political attitudes. Women have been found to vote less than men, to participate in political parties less than men, to know less about politics than men, to have less interest in politics than men and to be more conservative than men. A number of explanations of these findings have been suggested in this article. One type of explanation stresses the structural restraints militating against women's participation; the restraints, including the tasks of child-rearing and maintaining a home, are held to account for the lower political participation and knowledge since women, contrasted with men, are prevented from linking up with the wider network of social contacts which helps to maintain male political involvement. This explanation is obviously a powerful one and does account for the well-documented finding that women's rate of participation increases when such burdens cease and that mothers with young children are consistently less likely to vote than are fathers with young children across all levels of education within both the 21-34 and 35-54 age groups.

The article deals with the emergence and activities of a U.S. political phenomenon, the radical right. The conservative elements in U.S. society can be divided into two groups, the moderate conservatives and the radical right. These groups may be differentiated in terms of their attitudes towards the political era of New Dealism. The radical right refuses to accept the past, is radical in the sense that it rejects the status quo. It wants to turn the clock back all the way; it refuses to accept what has happened as something inevitable, or irreversible. Most, though not all the sections of the radical right are opposed to: the labor movement, preferring to see trade unions eliminated; the income tax, the movement for the repeal of the sixteenth amendment; the welfare state and government planning, it would like a return of limited government; the radical right sees the World War II as an avoidable mistake, and prefers in retrospect a policy of Russia and Germany fighting it out alone. The radical right views foreign policy from the recognition of Russia to Potsdam as appeasement, treachery and treason. It is opposed to membership in the United Nations, and to entangling foreign commitments. It tends to be Asia-oriented, rather than Europe-oriented; it is suspicious of Great Britain as a Machiavellian power which has manipulated people into wars, and refuses to back people in time of need.