| Abstract: | Studied the socio-political attitudes and political party preferences of 532 Swedish high school students as a function of seven background variables: (I) the mother's political party preference, (2) the father's political party preference, (3) the mother's education, (4) the father's education, (5) the mother's income, (6) the father's income and (7) social class identification. Multiple classification analysis and multivariate nominal analysis were used to uncover the most important possible determinants of political socialization of the youth in both bivariate and multivariate aspects. The results showed that, of the seven predictor or background variables studied, only three had any substantial relationship with socio-political attitudes and political party preferences of the youth: (a) the mother's political party preference, (b) class identification and (c) the father's political party preference in that general order of importance. Furthermore, the superiority of the mother's political party preference over the father's political party preference was especially marked for girls. Among other things, the results also disclosed that ‘left-wing’ youth tended to be more loyal to parental political beliefs than ‘moderate’ and ‘right-wing’ youth. Several alternative explanations were proposed for these findings. |
