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Working group

Beyond the Diploma Divide

Field of Education and Ideological Divisions among College Educated

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When

22 October 2024

17:15 - 18:30 CEST

Where

Hybrid Meeting

Sala del Capitolo and Zoom

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Part-time Professors at the EUI, Gary Marks and Liesbet Hooghe.

Education, conceived as the level of a person’s education, is a key variable in explaining political attitudes and behaviour. This study extends analysis of the effects of education to its substance – the field in which a person is educated. We use an educational skill schema developed by education sociologists to hypothesize a causal link between the human-centered skills conveyed in a field of study and a person’s political ideology. On the basis of the General Social Survey and surveys conducted by the authors in the United States and Europe, we find that the human-centeredness of a person’s field of education is strongly and positively associated with liberal attitudes on race, redistribution, the environment, trust in elections, and with their party identification. When we compare those who finished their education in high school with those with college degrees, we find that the human-centered skill content of a person’s education explains more variation in liberal/conservative attitudes than whether they went to college or not. Dynamic data from Germany reveal that a person’s field of education has a direct effect on a person’s political partisanship beyond its role as a proxy for earlier socialisation.

The Zoom link will be sent upon registration. If you would like to receive the paper, please contact PoliticalBehaviour.Colloquium@eui.eu.

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