Abstract
According to conventional wisdom in political behavior research, education has a direct causal effect on political participation. However, a number of recent studies have questioned this established view by arguing that education is not a direct cause of political participation but only a proxy for other factors that are not directly related to the educational experience. This paper engages in a current debate regarding the application of matching techniques to assess whether there is a direct causal effect of education on political participation. It uses data from a British cohort study that follows everyone born during 1 week in the UK in 1970. The data includes a rich set of variables measuring factors through childhood and adolescence such as cognitive ability and family socioeconomic status. This data provides the opportunity to match on a number of important variables that are not included in the US datasets used by previous studies in the field. Results show that after matching there are no significant effects of education on political participation.
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Notes
An alternative theoretical model, which also considers education to be a proxy, is presented by the sorting model of education effects (Nie et al. 1996; Campbell 2009; Persson 2011, 2013). According to this model, education has no value per se but rather serves as a proxy for social network position.
When analyzing the data used in this paper with propensity score matching results show significantly worse balance than for genetic matching. Moreover, coarsened exact matching leaves too many treated observations unmatched.
An alternative causal estimate is the average treatment effect for the controls (ATC). The main difference between the ATT and the ATC is that when estimating the ATC, the comparison is conditioned on the covariate distribution among the untreated. Hence, rather than evaluating whether education has a causal effect on those who received it (the ATT measure), the ATC evaluates a hypothetical counterfactual state in which untreated individuals would receive higher education. I follow Kam and Palmer (2008, 2011) in their interpretation of the literature as I am primarily concerned with whether education has a causal effect among those who actually received it, rather than what the effect would be if higher education were given to a random person not receiving it. Hence, if we are interested in whether education had any causal effect among those receiving it, the ATT is the primary relevant estimate.
Information about the 1970 British Cohort Study is available at http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/.
As for the treatment variable some dichotomization is necessary because of the restrictions of the available matching algorithms and software. Moreover, college education is the level of education that is largely considered to be a figurative step in people’s lives. Research on educational attainment describes college education as a “key transition” that has more explanatory power than, for example, cumulative years of education (cf. Kam and Palmer 2008). Additional analyses on data from the 1970 British Cohort Study confirm that college education is the most important educational level in relation to political participation. Participation levels are always significantly higher for individuals with college education than for individuals with all lower educational levels. Further, in regards to contact with politicians, and attending rallies and demonstrations, there is no significant difference between persons with no education and persons who have completed high school/secondary school; the significant difference is between those with higher education and those with lower levels of education.
The full questionnaires including the cognitive ability test can be found at http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/shared/get-file.ashx?id=142&itemtype=document.
Previous studies have used the summary scale of these indices as a proxy for IQ (Elliott et al. 1978). Following Deary et al. (2008), I construct a variable consisting of the scores on the first unrotated component and convert it to a traditional IQ scale with a mean of 100 and SD of 15. I use this measure to check for balance, see the online appendix for further details.
The problem of attrition out of the panel is difficult to address. Particularly troublesome is that low cognitive ability persons drop out of the panel to a higher degree. If setting the mean on the summary scales of the cognitive ability variables to 100 with a SD of 15 for the entire sample that answered these questions, the mean for those who participate in the 2004 survey are 101.7 (age 10 cognitive ability) and 101.2 (age 5 cognitive ability), a relatively small but statistically significant difference. Since non-graduates are less likely to answer the survey, it might be the case that the non-college attenders in the sample are more educated and have higher cognitive ability than the non-college attenders in the population. The low educated in the dataset may plausibly be participating more than the true population of people without college degrees. This would mean that the differences between college graduates and non-college graduates are underestimated in the dataset.
As for the item non-responses, I have checked among the 45% of the sample that made it to the 2004 survey to determine whether a binary indicator for deleted or not deleted, due to item non-response, is balanced across persons with college degrees and without college degrees (for each covariate used in the matching procedure). T test and Kolmogorov–Smirnov (K–S) test p-values indicate that most covariates are balanced across educational groups. However, significant differences in the amount of non-responses are found for family income 1986, parents’ education 1970, and the cognitive ability scores (except for the profile test). As for family income 1986, the differences in item non-responses between college educated and non-college educated is five percentage points. For the other covariates, differences in item non-responses are not higher than two percentage points.
A potential problem is that education is correlated with panel attrition. Among people who had graduated from college and responded to the survey in 2000, 85 % participated in 2004. The corresponding number was 79 % for the non-graduates. In 2008, 81 % of those with a college degree in the year 2000 participated in the survey, while only 70 % of the year 2000 non-graduates.
A comparison of the means for the matching covariates in the full 2004 dataset, with only the respondents in the balanced dataset, containing only those who participated in all previous waves, show small differences of means. All differences of means are less than 1/10 of a standard deviation. This is also the case within the sub-groups of those with and without higher education. For more information on the non-responses see, McDonald and others (2010). Non-responses were not missing at random: “Response was lower for cohort members who were men, having a mother who was younger at the birth, a mother who did not attempt to breastfeed, a lower birth weight baby, in a family with two or more children, born of non-married parents, a manual father and living in London” (McDonald and others 2010, 26). However, interest in politics was not found to be associated with non-response. This means that the population that this sample represents differs slightly from the total population and is biased towards the groups with high response rates mentioned above. Still, it should be acknowledged that the panel attrition rate is high and this should be taken into account when interpreting the results.
The matching has been carried out with the GenMatch package in R.
Table 1 in the online appendix presents results from the balance tests of the items that are used to construct the summary scales used for the matching procedure, as well as, the summary scales for cognitive ability at ages 5 and 10. While most covariates are unbalanced before matching, balance is achieved after matching (all K–S p-values indicate non-significant differences).
Figure 1 in online appendix presents standardized bias before and after matching for all items that are utilized to construct the summary scales used for the matching procedure, as well as, the summary scales for cognitive ability at ages 5 and 10. While most covariates are unbalanced before matching, only two covariates fall outside the confidence bounds after matching.
A further concern could be that the results are an artifact of the specific matching routine applied (1:1 with replacement). Replacement refers to whether a matched observation can be used again for another match. Tables 2 and 3 in online appendix report ATT estimates from genetic matching 1:2 with replacement (each treated matched to two untreated), as well as 1:1 and 1:2, without replacement. The results from 1:2 matching with replacement show no significant differences. However, estimates from matching without replacement show several significant differences in political participation between those with higher education and those without, in particular estimates derived after 1:2 matching. But since it is harder to achieve balance without replacement, and balance decreases as more untreated observations are matched with treated observations, we should not put too much confidence in these results.
A drawback of these measures is that this particular survey had an unusually low response rate. Hence, the number of persons with college education and responses on all relevant variables is reduced to 401.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Debbie Axlid, Peter Thisted Dinesen, Peter Esaiasson, Mikael Gilljam, Henrik Oscarsson, Sven Oskarsson, Zethyn Ruby, three anonymous reviewers, the editors of Political Behavior, and seminar participants at University of Copenhagen, Lund University, Uppsala University, the MPSA 2012 and the EPOP 2012 meetings for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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Persson, M. Testing the Relationship Between Education and Political Participation Using the 1970 British Cohort Study. Polit Behav 36, 877–897 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-013-9254-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-013-9254-0