Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

The construction of youth citizenship in Brazil is a strategic issue today, not only in the face of the numerical expression of young people in the country (they constitute 17.24% of the Brazilian population, according to IBGE Census 2010), but also because of the difficulties imposed on the socialization of these young people by the structural framework of Brazilian political culture. In this perspective, recent studies of political socialization in Brazil have attempted to understand how young people, who have grown within a relatively stable democratic context, comprehends democracy and their role as citizens in the current context of social inequality. Currently, Brazil is facing a scenario of political and institutional crisis, on which it is important to evaluate the understanding of youth about what is at stake in the democratic process. Thus, in this paper we seek to recognize the characteristics of the political culture of youngsters in Southern Brazil. Considering the high levels of inequality in the country, we consider that the type of school attended (public or private) indicates the existence of different youths in the south of the country which leads to distinctive evaluations concerning democracy as well as diverse patterns of political engagement. The hypothesis that guided this paper is that young people in Brazil develop different perspectives about politics depending on their socialization, which changes according to the type of school (public or private) they attend to. Those differences in values and conditions tend to lead to distinctive ways of understanding and interacting with politics. To perform this analysis, we used data obtained from a survey conducted with 2035 youngsters between 13 and 24 years old in Porto Alegre (RS) in 2015 and Florianópolis (SC) and Curitiba (PR) in 2016, the three capitals of southern Brazil. The results we found show that youth have been increasingly linking democracy to subjective and post-material aspects, tough each group has different emphasis given their socialization and economic status. Also, according to their socialization, we find distinctive patterns of political engagement, since youngsters from private schools tend to be more interested on politics and have more knowledge on the subject as they are exposed to a more safe and instigating environment.