The effect of educational attainment on political attitudes and behaviour

An individual's level of education is increasingly significant in explaining their political attitudes and behaviour: at the 2017 General Election in the UK, education demonstrated a stronger relationship with voter preferences than traditional cleavages such as social class (Jennings and Stoker, 2017; Ford and Goodwin, 2018). The UK is not alone in this: a similar relationship has been found in recent elections in the United States, France, Italy, Sweden and Germany, and in the 2016 referendum on EU membership (Inglehart and Norris, 2016).

But why education should have this effect on political attitudes - and why this relationship has intensified recently, alongside the advent of mass participation in Higher Education in these countries - is not well understood. Empirical studies have sought to establish the causal mechanism for the relationship between education and political attitudes empirically, and only very few have done so making use of longitudinal data to control for parental and childhood characteristics (Surridge, 2016). As a result, this relationship, in addition to the aggregate effect of mass participation, remains under-explored given its significance.

The proposed study will therefore examine the relationship between educational attainment and political attitudes, primarily through regression analysis of ESRC-funded longitudinal data on three different generations, seeking to address the following five questions:

1. What is the effect of educational attainment on political participation, party and policy preferences, controlling for pre-adult characteristics?
2. What is the effect of educational attainment on political attitudes in earlier and later generations?
3. What is the effect of subject choice, school characteristics and educational attainment post-16 on political interest?
4. What is the effect of educational attainment on political attitudes and policy preferences in later life?
5. What is the aggregate effect of mass participation in Higher Education within a Westminster Parliamentary constituency, over and above what would be expected based on population characteristics?

The study will speak to questions about emerging educational political cleavages by examining systematically how the relationship between education, political attitudes and policy preferences has evolved in the face of major changes in Higher Education. This would enable a greater understanding of cohort effects, the significance of an individual's secondary school and post-16 experience, and the varying influence of education on more widely accepted 'goods' such as political participation. As a result, it has the potential to inform policy responses on subject choice and access post-16, widening participation in HE, and the potential for changes to other training routes (eg apprenticeships) to enable greater scope for peer socialisation.