Abstract
Recent political trends and events have been marked by strong educational differences. In addition, education has also been shown to be a basis for group identity and group conflict. In this paper, we argue that educational groups are likely to understand their position in society and their inclusion or exclusion (in politics) as being related to their educational level. Thus, it is likely that education-based affective attitudes are related to evaluations of the societal and political status quo. Using data from nine European countries, this article charts the relationships of higher educated-bias (i.e., the preference for higher educated compared to less educated groups) with different political outcomes. In analyses of preregistered hypotheses, we demonstrate that the higher educated show ingroup bias, in particular those who identify strongly with their educational group. The less educated do not show (significant) ingroup bias. Those who have a stronger (positive) bias towards the higher educated display more political trust and satisfaction with democracy, and are less likely to be populist. We measured support for populism in four different ways with populist attitudes, populist voting, affective attitudes towards populist party supporters compared with mainstream party supporters, and identification with ‘the common people.’
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21 March 2024
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-024-00340-y
Notes
Preregistration can be found here: https://osf.io/jzupg.
But not exclusively the less educated, and also not all less educated, especially for radical-right-wing populist, as ethnic minorities, immigrants, etc., are also overrepresented among the less educated.
In our preregistration, we also preregistered the hypothesis that ingroup education bias is positively related to political interest. However, results did not confirm this hypothesis. For the motivation behind this hypothesis and the empirical results, see Appendix C in the Supplementary Material.
The preregistered hypothesis is about attitudes towards the parties themselves, which is more appropriate for our goals than attitudes towards party supporters. However, in the questionnaire, except for a few countries, the thermometer items revolved around attitudes towards party supporters, hence the current formulation. See also the “Methods” section and Table A1 in the Supplemental Material.
Including income identification does strengthen the effect of educational identification for the less educated, which is now significant. The less educated are then estimated to show more negative higher educated-bias when they identify little with their educational group (compared to Model 2, Table 1) and significantly more higher educated-bias when they identify strongly (compared to identifying weakly). As such, in this model educational identification increases outgroup bias for the less educated. We also display this pattern in Fig. B1 in Appendix B.
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This work is financially supported by the NORFACE Joint Research Programme on Democratic Governance in a Turbulent Age and co-funded by ANR, FWO, and NWO, and the European Commission through Horizon 2020 under Grant Agreement No. 822166.
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van Noord, J., Kuppens, T., Spruyt, B. et al. Education-based affective attitudes: higher educated-bias is related to more political trust and less populism. Acta Polit (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-023-00322-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-023-00322-6