Keeping on track and growing apart: An empirical analysis of the role of education and media in attitude formation

•At age of 14–15, new cleavage attitudes strongly related to educational track.•Students in general secondary education score lower on those attitudes than others.•Between ages 14 and 18, new cleavage differences between tracks increase greatly.•Differences not explained by social composition of tracks (parents’ education).•Instead, due to diverging media preferences of the pupils in the different tracks. Many researchers have observed a strong relationship between the level of education and the new political alignment, which is often described as cultural. Longitudinal research in Flanders, however, has revealed that higher education, as such, hardly influences the position on the new alignment. The strong relationship with the level of education is largely the result of selective access to higher education. That finding implies that the formation of those attitudes should be studied in young people, not only in adults. On the basis of a 2002 random sample of 1420 young people, aged 14–18, this article analyzes how differences in attitudes evolve over the course of secondary schooling, and how those differences are affected by educational tracking and mass media use. The findings are used to address empirical and theoretical issues in understanding the formation of attitudes.