Surveys children from 7 English public schools and state school children from Grammar, Secondary Modern and Comprehensive schools. Demonstrates that some groups are attitudinally homogenous and that their background is privileged in terms of attaining elite positions. If they achieve such positions they are likely to be in broad accord with others who are similarly successful. When state children achieve anything like attitudinal homogeneity it is often on items suggesting political passivity.

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WE are concerned in this note with the motivations for deliberate incursions into public/political activity by previously non-involved people. Thus, we exclude, for this study, the probably much larger number (certainly in established parties) who simply drift or are recruited into politics by those already active. Participation in activities other than voting is clearly a minority pursuit, but the active may be seen as transmitting communications between the actual decision-makers and the normally noninvolved, so that in general the latter are not outraged by the decision taken. This process can break down, and such a breakdown provided the occasion for the incursion studied. The circularity of this proposition as an explanation obviously robs it of any theoretical status, but for the moment we can offer no more satisfying methodology. Considering next the reasons why some are mobilized and not others, we induce the following typology: (i) Family traditional: family background of political involvement. (ii) Group factors: subscription to a group norm of political activity or seeking to serve