Cultural Backlash from the Youth's: Cultural War and Identities

Age has been one of the main explications for the materialist/ postmaterialist cleavage in the past few decades positioning young people in the postmaterialist space of attitudes versus older people on the materialist side. although age has been suggested as an important factor for social and political identities, some individuals under thirty-five may be found within the mixed and materialist group. This could indicate that the political culture of young people can also adjust and even acquire non-democratic, populist, non-participatory and intolerant attitudes towards the democratic regime, the political and economic system. In this sense, it is suggested that the differences in the social, political and economic identities of individuals under thirty-five can also lean towards the materialist side of the cleavage proposed by Inglehart (), contradicting the post-materialist tendency of young people. The data presented in the World Values Survey and the European Social Survey show a trend in the Spanish case that, although not totally representative of the macro levels, raises the need to extend the thesis of the cultural backlash to social strata under thirty-five years of age too. What type of political culture do young individuals express? What factors incline them towards more authoritarian positions_ Is current political culture representative of the identities of young people? We try to answer these questions in this paper using the data available for the Spanish case.