Essays on Electoral Systems and Representation

Few institutional developments illustrate more vividly Schattschneider's observation that "new policies create new politics" than the expansion of higher education (HE) over the past half century. Educational expansion is deeply intertwined with two central contemporary issues in advanced democracies: the emergence of 'value' divides pitting libertarian-cosmopolitans against authoritarian-nationalists, and the increase in income inequality associated with the rise of knowledge economies. The project leverages cross-country and over-time differences between HE institutions across four dimensions - size, stratification, curricular profile and education financing - to ask three questions. First, why do graduates and non-graduates' political attitudes over cultural and economic issues differ? Secondly, how do mechanisms of selection, socialisation and allocation linking education and values vary across cultural contexts? Thirdly, how did the expansion of HE change the political value spaces in contemporary party systems? To address these questions, I draw on a variety of existing and original institutional data, as well as employing a novel Bayesian measurement technique that allows me to draw on over a million survey observations spanning 30 years and 38 countries.