Although retraditionalization is often invoked to explain contemporary youth attitudes in Croatia, existing studies provide no firm evidence of its impact on those who came of age in the 1990s. This article treats the 1990s as a potential socialization setting and tests whether the retraditionalization project imprinted the cohort that reached adulthood amid war, state-building, and the Tuđman regime. Using ten waves of the Croatian National Electoral Studies(1995–2024) and an age–cohort–period framework, we offer a systematic assessment of this hypothesis. Contrary to expectations, we find no durable traditionalist imprint among the 1990s cohort across religious, nativist, and gender-conservative domains. Instead, patterns point to gradual liberalization between cohorts and to long-term stability in identity-anchored attitudes tied to political cleavages. Robustness tests confirm that formative exposure to the Tuđman era does not increase traditionalism and may reduce it. The findings challenge prevailing assumptions about youth socialization and the legacies of the 1990s.
Bartul Vuksan-Ćusa (Wed,) studied this question.