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High School and University Student’s Political Action Patterns

2009; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

Andrea Sólyom,

Global Education and Multiculturalism

This paper is a part of a larger thesis, which compares two groups’ relations to politics, based on empirical sources. The main question (which can be answered only partly in this paper) is: what are the particularities of the political culture of the studied populations?The timeliness of this topic is rooted in changes that took place after 1989 in political culture. Together with questions dating back sixty years, these new changes have spurred much debate and questioning in the literature, but few answers. The empirical resources are the result of two studies done in Romania. In addition to these datasets, the results of Hungarian and Romanian studies on a similar topic were taken in to account. Empirical antecedents of the last decade and a half were invaluable for the conceptualization and planning of this research. Thus, in the interpretation of the research results, it is possible to build from the foundation of international literature. Study of university students. In 2002 a study titled ‘Democracy?!’ was done among Hungarian and Romanian speaking students at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj. The sample was based on gender, branch of study and year of study. In ‘Democracy?!’ a total of 802 people were surveyed, 446 Hungarian speakers and 356 Romanian speakers. ‘Democracy?!’ began from the experiences resulting from ‘Civic culture 1’ (one of the studies in the series mentioned above) and it used some of the questions from that study.Study of high school students. The second study took place in 2004, among 12th class students from the ethnically Hungarian city of Odorheiu Secuiesc. In this city there are seven high schools where the language of study is Hungarian. There is a school, where there is an exclusively Romanian section, with two parallel classes. This was left out of the study because the target group was Hungarian-speaking students. The single class at the church school was also left out of the study. Totally 27 classes were interviewed. The study focused on the whole target population, so the dataset includes 373 students (only those students who were absent at the time of the research are not represented here). While planning both of the studies the author aimed to reveal/explore the student’s relationship to politics, as the content of political culture. The analysis is comprised of five dimensions: interest in politics, media consumption, political knowledge, opinions and actions. This paper focuses only on one dimension of the complex content of political culture: political action.