There is a growing concern about the lack of political interest and engagement among Western youth. This has led to a revival of political socialization studies. One recent finding is that (late) adolescence is key to understanding the development of interest for politics. This study builds on this finding by examining political interest among Finnish 16-to 18-year-olds. The intended contributions are twofold. Firstly, unlike most others, this study assesses the fundamental agents of socialization-the home, the school, and the friends-in the same analysis. Secondly, it focuses on the relative impact of the school in a high civic literacy environment. Countries differ from one another in terms of how much civic competence and education is valued and, along with the other Nordic countries, Finland is a typical high civic literacy country. This leads us to expect that the relative impact of the school as an environment for fostering political interest would be higher in the Finnish context than what previous findings from the North American context have indicated (Dostie-Goulet 2009). Our findings do not support that expectation. We find that over 50% of the variation between youth political interest was explained by variations in the presence of politics in the family and among one's friends. The high-performing Finnish educational system or a national commitment to civic participation do not seem to matter much in the role of a socializing actor as far as the development of political interest is concerned.

This study critically assesses the claim of the cartel party theory that the party in central office (PCO) has lost its powers to the party in public office (PPO) as parties have adapted to various changes in their operating ‘environment’. The study argues that a party’s tendency to adapt is conditioned by the party’s ‘genetic’ heritage: if the PCO assumed a prominent position during the party’s institutionalization, it can more likely stand against external pressures compared to a PCO that has been traditionally weak. The study compares the development (1983–2017) of two Finnish parties, which hail from polar ‘genetic’ traditions: a social democratic mass party and a conservative cadre party. The change of the party ‘environment’ has strongly supported PCO’s decay. Unlike earlier longitudinal studies on intra-party power balance, the study assesses all significant power dimensions and finds a contradictory development: while the distribution of leadership positions and resources increasingly favour the PPO in both parties, significant ‘genetic’ differences in the distribution of formal decision-making power have not diminished at all. If statutory regulations matter, the results suggest that the PPO cannot ‘insulate’ like the cartel model expects in parties where the PCO’s strong role has been strictly codified.

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