This study analyses university students' value systems and the relationships among these systems and their attitudes towards democracy. Two hundred and eighty-four university students from Goiânia (Brazil) answered the Psychosocial Values Questionnaire and the Scale of Attitudes Towards Democracy. Schwartz's Theory about motivational types of values and Inglehart's Theory on materialist and pos-materialist values were used to analyse the underlying dimensions of structure and content of students' value systems. The results showed that the values were organized according to four systems: hedonist, religious, materialist and pos-materialist. Besides this, the results also indicated that adhesion to materialist values was negatively correlated to democracy while the adhesion to pos-materialist values contributes to a positive attitude towards democracy. The similarities among these results and previous studies are discussed.
value systems; attitudes; democracy
