Is Education the Great Political Equalizer?

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

Abstract

It is a well-established fact, from decades of political socialization research, that children of politically active parents are more likely to become politically active themselves. This poses a challenge to democracy, since it means that inequalities in political influence will be reproduced across generations.
What can be done to break this chain and alleviate the intergenerational inequality in political opportunity? Traditionally, many political scientists have put their hopes in the equalizing potential of improved educational standards, i.e., a more educated citizenry has been assumed to create a society with less participatory inequality. Yet, recently this view has been called into question by scholars who argue that the relationship between educational attainment and political participation may be spurious rather than causal.
A weakness with much of the previous research in this field, however, is that it treats education as a standardized commodity that affects all types of individuals similarly. In reality, education comes in many forms and varieties, and different types of education may affect different individuals differently. To understand whether improved educational standards can help reduce political inequality we must therefore open up the black-box of education and study how different types of educational reforms affect political participation among different groups of individuals. Towards this end, the present study examines how three different large-scale educational reforms implemented in Sweden during the 20th century affected the inter-generational correlation in voting.
The first reform that we study is the large expansion of the upper-secondary school system that was undertaken in Sweden during the post-war period. The number of upper-secondary schools in the country more than doubled from 1940 to 1960, which substantively increased the access to education for working- and middle-class children. The second reform is the introduction of a comprehensive school system in Sweden in the 1950s, which lengthened compulsory schooling by one year and delayed tracking. The third, and final reform, to be studied was introduced in the early 1990s and lengthened vocational training programs at the upper secondary level from two to three years and added more general theoretical content to the curriculum. The fact that these reforms had rather different content and impacted different cohorts and groups of children, enables us to provide a richer and more nuanced picture of the extent to which more and better education can help reduce inter-generational political inequality.
The empirical analyses will be based on data from Swedish population registers together with digitized turnout data for five general elections held between 1970 and 2019. Using this data, we can connect voter turnout of children to that of their parents and study the extent to which the inter-generational correlation in voting was affected by the different types of educational reforms. Because we have access to population-wide data we can also study whether the effects of education differ across various subgroups of the population.
As a follow-up, we will make use of a sample of identical (MZ) twins from the Swedish Twin Registry matched to their parents to provide further insights into the moderating effects of education on intergenerational political inequality. Specifically, the existence of identical twins gives us access to a type of natural experiment in which the siblings in a twin pair are genetically identical and share their upbringings. That is, by including fixed effects for family in the models (so called discordant twin models) we can completely rule out confounding from genetic factors as well as family environment when estimating the moderating effects of education on the intergenerational association in turnout behavior. Furthermore, the twin sample include a host of attitudinal measures which will enable us to partially test potential mechanisms for the moderating influence of educational attainment.

Authors

• Karl-Oskar Lindgren, Uppsala University

• Sven Oskarsson, Uppsala University