Separation by Degrees

• In Event: Social Cleavages, Realignment and Belief Systems

Abstract

Throughout advanced democracies, citizens with and without tertiary education are divided on policy and politics. The educated generally welcome immigrants, support European integration and increasingly vote for Green or social-liberal parties. Citizens without tertiary education are less positive about immigration and the EU, and increasingly vote for Populist Radical Right Parties. A citizens’ level of education has become one of the most important socio-structural determinants of attitudes and voting on the second dimension of political competition (Häusermann and Kriesi, 2015) and scholars have started to assess whether divides are crystallizing into a full-fledged political cleavage (Bovens & Wille, 2017a; Stubager, 2010).

What explains this divide? In this article, we argue that the social closure of the educated has increased differences in political attitudes and voting between those with and without tertiary education. Social closure refers to a process of group boundary formation in which social groups with distinct experiences and opportunities become increasingly insulated from the rest of society (Weber, 1921). We will demonstrate that in contrast to only two decades ago, a growing proportion of educated citizens now have educated parents, partners and social networks. Social closure, we propose, affects political attitudes and voting by simultaneously increasing within-group interactions and relationship formation, and decreasing cross-group interactions and relationship formation. A long line of scholarship on social influence shows that individual political attitudes and behavior are influenced by those in their social networks (Zuckerman et al., 2005). Homogeneous social networks can reinforce existing attitudes, while heterogeneous networks moderate them (Brauer and Judd, 1996; Mutz, 2002). We expect that educated networks will exert a liberalizing influence and uneducated networks will make individuals more conservative.

To test this expectation, we use cross-sectional data from twelve European countries and panel data from the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. In a series of analyses, we look at the relationship between education-based network homogeneity and attitudes towards immigration and the EU, and voting for Populist Radical Right Parties, Green parties and Social Liberal parties. Our empirical strategy consists of two parts. First, we set out to provide evidence for our main expectation: educated(uneducated) networks make individuals more progressive(conservative). Results from multivariate regression models with extensive controls show that having educated(uneducated) parents, partners and whole networks is associated with more progressive(conservative) attitudes and voting. Moreover, the more(fewer) educated ties a respondent has, the more progressive(conservative) that respondent is. Next, using a Two-Way Fixed Effects (TWFE) model, we compare the time trend of attitudes and voting among people whose network changes with respect to the number of educated persons it contains, with the time trend of those whose network does not change. We find that for most outcome variables, a change in the education level of one’s network leads to more progressive(conservative) attitudes and voting. These results provide evidence that the education level of networks independently influences attitudes and voting on the second dimension of political competition.

We then apply this framework to partially reconcile two current explanations for education-based political divides. The liberalization hypothesis argues that it is the specific experience of attending higher education that makes the educated more progressive. Empirical evidence for this hypothesis is mixed (Cavaille & Marshall, 2019; Simon, 2022). The socialization hypothesis argues that the educational divide can instead be explained by socialization during childhood and selection into education (Lancee & Sarrasin, 2015). If network education levels matter, those from uneducated backgrounds should be liberalized more than those from educated backgrounds. The implication is that as more educated people come from educated backgrounds, the average liberalizing effect becomes smaller, partly explaining mixed empirical findings. Again using panel data from the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, we indeed find that education only liberalizes those from uneducated backgrounds.

Taken together, we demonstrate that education-based political divides have grown because the educated both have distinct personal and societal experiences and live increasingly separate from those without tertiary education.

Authors

• Jona de Jong, European University Institute

• Jonne Kamphorst, Stanford University