Suchergebnisse

Scholarly interest in student political behavior has grown markedly in recent years. Among those who have done research and written on Latin American students a good deal of effort has gone into attempts to develop some generalizations about bases of student activism. A major objective of these efforts has been to try and explain why students become politically active and what differentiates the politically active from the inactive students. Several hypotheses have been advanced in this research attempting to explain high degrees of student political involvement by relating it to factors in the students' backgrounds or environment. Some of the hypotheses which stand out in the literature have been selected for analysis here. They will be examined in relation to data gathered during recent research on university students in Guatemala.

University Students Have Been a Highly Visible Participant in Latin American politics for many years. To cite a few examples, they played an important role in the overthrow of the regimes in Cuba (1933, 1959), Guatemala (1944), Venezuela (1958), and Bolivia (1964), and have led significant anti-government demonstrations in nearly every Latin American country at one time or another. No government in the region can afford to disregard students as a political group.