ABSTRACT
This article documents results of an ongoing 20-year, 6-wave longitudinal study of 201 German peace movement sympathizers, first surveyed in 1985 at an average age of 14½. The aim of the part of the study reported in this article is to predict current political involvement on the grounds of knowledge about earlier cognitive, emotional, and conative political involvement. Regression analyses show that it is not so much early engagement in political activities, like going to demonstrations, that let's one predict middle adulthood political mobilization but early cognitive and emotional involvement with politics, like being alarmed about ongoing stressful macrosocial conditions. With regard to cognitive involvement, factual knowledge about politics plays a more important role than early self-actualization values in the Inglehartian sense do. Altogether, approximately 12% of the variance in current political involvement of individuals in their mid-30s can be explained on the grounds of information about life circumstances and attitudes in adolescence.
