Which Political Activities Are Caused by Education? Evidence from Entry Exams

• In Event: The Impact of (Higher) Education on Political Outcomes (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

Research on education's effect on participation is split between those who argue that education is a “universal solvent” that causally increases participation and those who hold that education merely proxies for pre-adult differences, with no independent effects. Unfortunately, the literature’s focus on this dichotomy means that less attention has been given to how education may differentially impact various political activities. We recast the debate over education's effects within a calculus of participation to theorize how education impacts political activities according to their costs and benefits.

To empirically explore the differential impacts of education across political activities, researchers must overcome two major challenges. First, they must disentangle self-selection into education based on pre-adult differences from the causal effect of education on participation. We address self-selection by leveraging a natural experiment created by entry exams for upper-level secondary schools in Switzerland. Second, exploring whether the effects of education differ across political activities requires access to measures covering these activities. To analyze participation across various forms of political engagement, we fielded an original survey of former students, conducted 40 years after they sat the exam.

Comparing former students who narrowly passed or failed their exam, we find that an additional year of education increases electoral and low-cost non-electoral participation. We find no effects on high-cost non-electoral participation, however. These findings suggest that, rather than being a universal solvent or a mere proxy, education's effect depends on the costs and benefits associated with the activity. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of how education shifts the calculus of participation, which types of civic engagement are strengthened by education, and the role of education in increasing and decreasing political equality.

Authors

• Dalston G Ward, ETH Zurich

• Dominik Hangartner, London School of Economics

• Lukas Schmid