The authoritarian habitus in popular classes: A Study with Students of Juiz de Fora High School

Abstract

Within the current political conjuncture of western societies, the rise of what has been known in the academy as the "new right" is notorious. Thus inspired by this phenomenon, I aim to contribute for the study of the relationship between youthfulness and conservatism/authoritarianism in Brazil. For this, high school students from four schools in Juiz de Fora-MG were submitted to questionnaires, intending to explore the correlation between certain social class attributes and the manifestation of authoritarianism. Some important findings were made, such as the observation that the lower income layers are the ones that most adhere to this position. In this sense, the data indicates that these layers are the most authoritarian and, at the same time, the most depoliticized, besides having a strong religious bias, especially evangelical. The study, therefore, confirms the main hypothesis that the capital (financial, cultural and social) accrued by the individuals in the study, according to how it is presented in higher or lesser degrees, has a direct relation with the expression of their authoritarianism. The results presented in the present work were obtained from bivariate correlations between the researched variables.