How Policy Feedback from Educational Opportunity Shapes Fairness Perceptions

• In Event: The Many Angles of Policy Feedback

Abstract

Educational attainment is a strong predictor of a wide variety of political attitudes and behaviours. Consequently, a large literature investigates the role of educational socialization on long-run preferences towards democracy and civic participation. Beyond attainment alone, specific features of individuals' educational experiences, such as streaming/ tracking or exposure to specific socio-demographic groups such as low-income groups or immigrants shape adult attitudes. Emerging research argues that these educational experiences can affect a broad range of long-run attitudes about institutional fairness more generally.

This paper theorizes the link between formative experiences of institutional fairness, subsequent beliefs about fairness of educational institutions and downstream attitudes towards inequality and redistribution. We provide initial empirical evidence for these claims using data from the European Social Survey combined with an original dataset measuring institutional fairness.
We argue that institutions can provide cues about underlying norms of fairness, that individuals update over their lifecycle. We hypothesize that institutions that are formally equal, but which produce low levels of social mobility, create strong perceptions of social unfairness, via two mechanisms: a direct rise of educated unemployment/mismatch, and an indirect perception of institutional unfairness. By contrast, institutionally stratified systems (e.g. early tracking systems) creating both different paths from school to work and expectations about mobility, reduce overall assessments of unfairness across the life-cycle.

To test these claims, we operationalise equality of opportunity in specific countries and birth-cohorts in two ways: 1) by estimating the observed intergenerational association between parent and child education using the ESS, and 2) through an original dataset that codes education system features that promote decreased institutional stratification matched to respondents’ formative years.

We find that individuals’ perceptions of the fairness of their own opportunities and those available to others are strongly correlated with the actual influence of family background on educational attainment in their birth cohort and country. The role played by institutions that shape educational equity is surprisingly weak, suggesting that equalising institutional features of education system design are unlikely to build long-term confidence in the education system. However, citizens perceive the combination of institutionally equal education systems with low levels of social mobility as the most `unfair’, and the educational gradient on these perceptions varies across place.

Authors

• Daniel McArthur, University of Oxford

• Jane R. Gingrich, University of Oxford