Poliittisesta aluetutkimuksesta konfliktinsäätelyteoriaan : radikalismi suomalaisen valtio-opin tutkimuskohteena 1950-luvulta 1970-luvulle

Kirjoittajat

• Petri Koikkalainen

Abstrakti

Finnish social scientists across disciplinary borders developed an interest in the special characteristics of their country’s regions during the 1950s. Political scientists and sociologists got their main methodological influences from American behavioralism and French political ecology. A central topic of their studies was ‘radicalism’, which became operationalised as support of Communism, or the party SKDL (Finnish People’s Democratic League). The emergence of ‘radicalism’ had a strong regional bias towards the eastern and northern peripheries of Finland. This article first describes the background and some central results of the ‘regional’ research program of the 1950s and 60s. Then it will concentrate on the scientific and political interests behind the ‘regional’ research program. The latter part of the article explains why the program was criticized and partly rejected in the late 1960s. At the same time, the whole study of radicalism was politicised in a way unprecedented in Finnish social science.