Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

The importance of civic engagement in public affairs and its effect in the quality of democracy has been one of the main focus of the political culture studies. However, the existence of institutions responsible for mediating the political process has not proved to be sufficient to guarantee an egalitarian democracy, nor to build an active political culture in Brazilian society. Within this framework, investment in public educational policies and the qualification of public education are essential for the reduction of social inequalities and an important instrument for the formation of critical and politicized citizens. In this sense, this paper seeks to present a comparative study of political socialization in secondary schools of Porto Alegre/RS, between the years of 2002 and 2015. Operationalizing the concept of civic competence, we evaluated the affective and cognitive dimensions that impel young people to become politicized citizens. The main objective is to verify if the increase of investments in social policies, specially in the educational field, that occurred in those 13 years while PT was in government was able to generate a greater civic competence among the youth. The central hypothesis is that these policies were not able to change the levels of social capital, culture and political sophistication of young people, indicating the continuity of a hybrid political culture. To do so, we analysed the survey data from the Research Centre on Latin America (NUPESAL) of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in the years of 2002 and 2015, verifying if the increasing investments made by the Federal Government in education through this period affected the levels of civic competence. The results obtained prove the hypothesis that the social and educational policies implemented along this Government were not sufficient to change the pattern of hybrid political culture in the public-school system. Public schools not only reduced their civic competence index in relation to 2002, but also stretched the distance of their indicators from private schools in 2015. The conclusion of this paper is that the policies implemented between 2002 and 2015 allowed an expansion and universalization of the access to education to those who couldn’t afford, however they did not increase the quality of education, especially when compared to the private schools. The index found in this study, indicate that educational inequality in the country, especially in the context of citizen inclusion, is still far from being solved.