The Transition from Student to Adult Politica*

Transcription

1 The Transition from Student to Adult Politica* JAMES MAX FENDRICH, Florida State University R 0 B E R T W. T U R N E R, University of Southern Mississippi Abstract This study is the second follow-up of 1960s civil rights activists. It examines the long-term effects of political activism. Consistent with Mannheim's thesis we find that the former activists are a distinctive intragenerational unit that differ significantly from two control groups. We also find control groups becoming more politically active with age. This provides limited support for a maturation effect. Finally, all three groups became more conservative in their political attitudes during the 1980s, demonstrating a period effect. The 1960s social movements generated voluminous research on the causes of political protest. In contrast there has been little empirical research on the consequences of these movements for the participants. The empirical studies (Fendrich 1977; Fendrich & Krauss 1978; Fendrich & Tarleau 1973; Hoge & Ankney 1982; Jennings 1987; Marwell, Aiken & Demerath 1987; Nassi & Abromowitz 1979; Whalen & Flacks 1980) support Mannheim's ([1928] 1972) theory of distinctive intragenerational units forming out of intense youthful politics. There is, however, a major research gap. Most of the studies have too short a time period to test for either maturation (Cutler & Bengtson 1974; Lipset & Ladd 1972) or period effects (Braungart & Braungart 1988; Weil 1987). The objective of the present study is to overcome the limitations of previous work. Twenty-five years have now elapsed since the subjects were students and 15 since our last follow-up study. This time span should be sufficient to begin to adjudicate between Mannheim's theory of intragenerational units, political maturation, and period effects. *This research was partially funded by a Summer Grant from Florida State University. We appreciate the editorial assistance and comments of Susan Carlson, the anonymous referees, and the outside readers Russell Dalton, Richard Flacks, M. Kent Jennings, Robert J. S. Ross, and Ed Walsh. Direct correspondence to James Max Fendrich, Department of Sociology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL The University of North Carolina Press 1049

2 1050 / Social Forces Volume 67:4, June 1989 Data and Variables In 1971, data were gathered using an after-only design with activists and control groups selected on the basis of previous student political involvement. Data were gathered from former students who had attended Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.' The three groups of subjects occupy positions along a continuum of student political activism. At one end are the politically noninvolved undergraduates who were not active in student government or protest politics. At the other end are the civil rights activists, who engaged in protest politics. They confronted segregated southern institutions in a successful attempt to change racial practices. In between these two groups are members of student government whose political expression followed a consensual, cooperative model of institutional politics. They were playing anticipatory socialization roles for adult politics. In 1971 we mailed a total of 150 questionnaires (50 to each group) and, 95 (63%) returned the questionnaires. In 1986, we used the addresses of the 10 year-follow-up study, current addresses from the alumni office, phone directories and phone calls, to locate 101 of the original 150 subjects. Eighty-five returned questionnaires. 2 Three variables measure the consequences of student politics. Two measure political ideology and attitudes and one measures political behavior. Political ideology is measured by asking respondents to place themselves on a political spectrum. They are given 12 choices: (1) Very Conservative, (2) Conservative Republican, (3) Conservative Democrat, (4) Moderate Republican, (5) Independent, (6) Moderate Democrat, (7) Liberal Republican, (8) Liberal Democrat, (9) New Left, (10) Socialist, (11) Radical, and, (12) Anarchist. 3 Nettier and Huffman's (1957) radical-conservatism scale measures political attitudes. The scale juxtaposes positions that would favor either a capitalist or a socialist political economy. Respondents answer each statement using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Scores for the scale range from 14 to 70. Higher scores indicate a more radical political orientation. The third dependent variable is political behavior. A 5-item scale measures the extent to which respondents follow political events in the media, vote in elections, perform organizational work in political campaigns, participate in demonstrations, and participate in any form of illegal political activity. The scale measures active participation in institutional and noninstitutional politics. There are 4 responses ranging from frequently to never. The scores range from 5 to 20. High scores indicate a high level of political behavior. Guttman scalogram analysis demonstrated the scale was unidimensional with a coefficient of reproducibility of.923. Cutler and Bengtson (1974) state that it is easy to confound and difficult to unravel long-term processes such as generation, maturation,

3 Student and Adult Politics / 1051 and period effects. We heartily agree. We could wait until all the historical forces play their cards. Unfortunately, as the economist, Keynes, once said, "In the long run we are all dead." An alternative is to establish statistical criteria for testing each alternative hypothesis. 4 While not definitive, this will provide a rigorous standard for interpreting results. If Mannheim's thesis of distinctive intragenerational units is correct, we would expect to find the relative positions of the three groups to be the same over the last 15 years. The statistically significant differences on the dependent variables in 1971 should also be present in If the maturation thesis is correct, we would expect to find that significant differences between the activists and the control groups in 1971 would no longer exist in 1986 on measures of ideology and political attitudes. The extreme positions of the former activists will have moderated to positions closer to the two control groups. A second prediction is that respondents would have an increased level of political participation by The research literature on political behavior reports increasing levels of political participation as citizens reach mid-life (Verba & Nie 1972). The political climate of the 1980s is substantially different from the 1960s. The election of Ronald Reagan and other conservatives signalled the arrival of a conservative period. Strong support for new government sponsored programs to help the needy no longer exists. If there is a strong period effect, we would expect all three groups to shift in a conservative direction on measures of political ideology and attitudes. In order to test these predictions, differences of means for the three dependent variables were run between the different groups in 1971 and 1986 and for each group in 1971 and Results Table 1 reports the pair-wise T tests for the former activists, student government leaders, and noninvolved students on our measure of political ideology political self-identification. In 1971 the activists are significantly farther to the left than the other two groups. Former student government leaders and the noninvolved are not significantly different. The same pattern holds in The activists remain significantly to the left of the two control groups while again the control groups do not differ from each other. Although there is a decline in the leftist ideology of the activists over the last 15 years, the change is not statistically significant. The only group that changes significantly on this measure are the former student government leaders, who became more conservative. These findings lend support to the intragenerational unit thesis of Mannheim. Table 2 reports the means for the three groups on the radical-con-

4 1052 / Social Forces Volume 67:4, June 1989 Table 1. POLITICAL SELF-IDENTIFICATION BV STUDENTACTIVISM Year Group N x S.D. Significance Activist Student Government Activist Noninvolved Student Government Noninvolved Activist Student Government Activist Noninvolved Student Government Noninvolyed Activist Activist Student Government Student Government Noninvolved Noninvolved servative scale. There is evidence for both Mannheim's hypothesis and a significant period effect. In 1971 the former activists either support socialist positions or are very ambivalent about capitalism. In contrast both the student government leaders and the noninvolved strongly support capitalism. In the 1980s, world leaders such as Reagan and Thatcher proclaimed socialism dead. Noted Marxist scholars such as Heilbroner (1987) agree that support for a socialist ideology has declined and capitalist ideology has been revived. It would be reasonable to expect a shift in socialist attitudes among the former activists and even stronger procapitalist attitudes among the two control groups. This is precisely what happened. Former activists maintain their relative position to the left of the two control groups over the last 15 years, however, all three groups significantly shift their positions in the same direction. There is no evidence of the three groups' merging toward some centrist position. They remain distinguishable. The activists moved from a support for socialism to an ambivalent left-of-center position. The other two groups are significantly more conservative than the activists and strongly support the capitalist political economy.

5 Student and Adult Politics / 1053 Table 2. RADICALISM-CONSERVATISM BV STUDENT ACTI VISM Year Group N x S.D. Significance 1971 Activist Student Government Activist Noninvolved Student Government Noninvolved Activist Student Government Activist Noninvolved Student Government Noninvolved Activist Activist Student Government Student Government Noninvolved Noninvolved Table 3 reports the means for the three groups on political behavior. These results again show support for a distinctive generational unit and some support for political maturation among the control groups. In 1971, activists are significantly more active in adult politics than both the former student government leaders and the noninvolved students. However, in 1986 the activists no longer differ significantly in the level of political behavior from student government leaders. They continue to be more active than the noninvolved students. Student government leaders are also more politically active than the noninvolved. Looking at the changes over time, it is dear that the former activists have not changed their political behavior. They continue to be highly involved, while the two control groups have become more involved in institutional politics. These two control groups consist mainly of successful businessmen and professionals who see the merits, or necessity, of greater political involvement as they reach their mid-forties. For the control groups there has been a normal progression in their political life-cycle. In one sense they are just reaching the levels of political maturity that the activists attained in 1971.

6 1054 / Social Forces Volume 67:4, June 1989 Table 3. POLITICAL BEHAVIOR BV STUDENTACTIVISM Year Group N x S.D. Significance 1971 Activist Student Government Activist Noninvolved Student Government Noninvolved 32 10, Activist Student Government Activist Noninvolved Student Government Noninvolved Activist Activist Student Government Student Government Noninvolved Noninvolved 32 11, When the findings on the political behavior scale are disaggregated there are important additional findings. The former activists continue to be active in protest politics. In 1971, 74 percent of the activists continue to demonstrate or take part in some form of illegal political activity. The comparable figures for student government leaders and the noninvolved are 7 percent and 9 percent, respectively. In 1986 the percentages are exactly the same. It is clear that the activists as an intragenerational unit continue to engage in noninstitutional political protest. This finding is the strongest evidence for Mannheim's generational unit thesis. 6 Conclusions By the late 1980s sufficient time had elapsed to estimate the long-term effects of the 1960s protests on later adult politics. We can now begin to separate out intragenerational unit, maturation, and period effects. Our results provide strong support for the generational unit continuity thesis

7 Student and Adult Politics / 1055 on the three dependent variables. For the activists there is a high degree of absolute continuity in political behavior. They continue to be very active in both institutional and protest politics. Nonprotest political activity increases among the former student government leaders and the noninvolved students. Increased activity reflects what life-cycle theorists would call a maturation effect. The conservative political environment in the 1980s has had a period effect on radical-conservative attitudes for all three groups. They have moved significantly in the same conservative direction, but contrary to Weil (1987) there has been no closing of the gap between groups. When compared with the two control groups, the former activists demonstrate relative continuity in their political self-identification and political attitudes. Is Mannheim's thesis correct? This thesis is harder to disprove given the cumulative findings of follow-up studies of the 1960s generation and a small number of studies on community activism (Cable, Walsh & Warland 1988; Luebke 1981). While it would be unrealistic to expect former student activists to have attitudes and patterns of behavior in the 1980s identical to those they had in the 1960s, studies show that former student activists continue to be a distinctive generational unit in terms of their ideology, political attitudes and behavior. Notes 1.Tallahassee was one of the major centers of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s (Matthews & Prothro 1966; Morris 1984). For more information on the original protest environment and the design of the 1971 follow-up study, see Fendrich and Tarleau (1973). 2. Of the students originally sampled, we know that five are deceased. It was more difficult to trace former activists. Geographically, they were more dispersed than the two control groups and both our phone calls to difficult-to-trace subjects and volunteered comments on the questionnaires revealed that a few former activists had less favorable memories of their experiences while attending the university. We suspect that our responses may be somewhat biased toward the attitudes and behaviors of the more moderate former activists. This bias works against confirming the hypothesis of distinctive intragenerational units. Our response rate is comparable to those of the recent studies by Jennings (1987) and Marwell, Aiken & Demerath (1987). 3. This single item correlates.80 with the following 14-item radical-conservatism scale. 4. It should be noted that we are not testing for cohort effects. The analysis focuses on variation among intragenerational units within a cohort. 5. The subjects over time were not identical. Some who participated in 1971 did not participate in the survey in 1986 and vice versa. Sixty-eight subjects participated in both surveys. The t-tests were run separately with this smaller N. The results were the same, that is, the level of significance of the t-test did not differ. Of the 24 t-tests that were compared only two changed slightly. They both involved the random sample. Weak significant relations at the.05 level of confidence were significant at the.10 level for the smaller N of matched subjects. Substantively, the comparisons between the matched and unmatched groups for the random sample indicate there was a slightly smaller shift to conservative political attitudes and a smaller increase in the level of political behavior for the smaller matched random sample. These differences were assumed to be due to chance.

8 1056 / Social Forces Volume 67:4, June Some additional evidence suggests a lifelong commitment of the former activists. They remain concentrated in public sector occupations and have significantly lower incomes. In 1986 activists earn on average $31,565, compared to $53,600 and $47,250 for former student government leaders and the noninvolved, respectively. The analysis of variance between the three groups had an F ratio of , significant beyond the.0001 level. The lower income for activists does not seem to be a terrible price to pay for remaining a distinctive intragenerational unit acting as agents for social change. References Braungart, Richard G., and Margaret M. Braungart 'Political Generations. - In Research in Political Sociology. Vol. 4, edited by Richard G. Braungart and Margaret M. Braungart. JAI Press. Cable, Sherry, Edward Walsh, and Rex Warland "Differential Paths to Political Activism: Comparisons of Four Mobilization Processes After the Three Mile Island Accident." Social Forces 66: Cutler, Neal E., and Vern Bengtson 'Age and Political Alienation: Maturation, Generation and Period Effects." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 415: Fendrich, James M "Keeping the Faith or Pursuing the Good Life: A Study in the Consequences of Participation in the Civil Rights Movement." American Sociological Review 42: Fendrich, James M., and Ellis Krauss "Student Activism and Adult Left-Wing Politics: A Causal Model of Political Socialization for Black, White and Japanese Students of the 1960s Generation." Pp in Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change. Vol. 1, edited by Louis Kriesberg. JAI Press. Fendrich, James M., and Alison T. Tarleau "Marching to a Different Drummer: The Occupational and Political Orientations of Former Student Activists." Social Forces 52: Heilbroner, Robert "A Capitalist Manifesto." A review of Peter L. Berger's The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality and Liberty in Contemporary Sociology 16: Hoge, Dean R., and Tersea L. Ankney "Occupations and Attitudes of Former Student Activists Ten Years Later." Journal of Youth and Adolescence 11: Jennings, M. Kent "Residues of a Movement: The Aging of the American Protest Generation." American Political Science Review 81: Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Everett Carll Ladd, Jr "The Political Future of Activist Generations." Pp in The New Pilgrims: Youth Protest in Transition, edited by Phillip G. Altbach and Robert S. Lauffer. McKay. Luebke, Paul 'Activists and Asphalt. A Successful Anti-expressway Movement in a 'New South City." Human Organization 40: Mannheim, Karl. [ "The Problem of Generations." Pp in The New Pilgrims, edited by Phillip G. Altbach and Robert S. Lauffer. McKay. Marwell, Gerald, Michael Aiken, and N. J. Demerath "The Persistence of Political Attitudes Among 1960s Civil Rights Activists." Public Opinion Quarterly 51: Matthews, Donald, and James Prothro Negroes and the New Southern Politics. Harcourt, Brace & World. Morris, Aldon D The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. Free Press. Nassi, A. J., and S. 1. Abramowitz "Transition or Transformation? Personal and Political Development of Former Berkeley Free Speech Movement Activists." Journal of Youth and Adolescence 8:21-35.

9 Student and Adult Politics / 1057 Nettier, G., and J. Huffman "Political Opinion and Personal Security." Sociometry 20: Verba, Sidney, and N. Nie Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality. Harper & Row. Weil, Frederick D "Cohorts, Regimes, and the Legitimation of Democracy: West Germany Since 1945." American Sociological Review 52: Whalen, John James, and Richard Flacks "The Isla Vista 'Bank Burners' Ten Years Later: Notes on the Fate of Student Activists!, Sociological Focus 13: