Education as a growing source of social and political cleavage

Abstract

The deepest gradient observed in voting at the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership was structured along educational lines. Since Brexit, education has continued to play a key role in shaping public opinion and electoral behaviour. Despite there now being a consensus within public discourse that a stark educational divide has emerged in British politics, scant academic research has been undertaken in this area to-date and thus, little is known about the complex association of educational attainment with public opinion and electoral behaviour. This three-paper thesis provides a timely address to these gaps in knowledge. Each paper applies advanced quantitative methods to high-quality secondary data sources - including the British Election, British Household Panel and Understanding Society surveys - and contributes to providing a deeper understanding of how, and why, it is that educational attainment has come to shape the ways individuals think and vote in Britain today. Paper 1 seeks to understand why individuals with differing levels of educational attainment have tended to vote differently in recent British political contests. It uses mediation analysis to explore precisely what proportion of education’s total effect on vote choices was transmitted indirectly in British referendums and general elections from 2016-2019 and to identify the relative contribution of economic orientations, cultural attitudes and political cue-taking behaviours as drivers of this educational divide. Paper 2 builds on Paper 1, by investigating why it is that individuals with differing levels of education come to think differently in the first place. It uses a within-sibship design to provide a more robust test of higher education’s causal effect on British individuals’ attitudes in the period 1994-2020 and ultimately reveals the extent to which the differences observed in graduates’ and non-graduates’ attitudes are shaped by non-random selection into universities versus the educational and experiential effects of university study. Finally, Paper 3 moves beyond the individual-level of analysis, bringing geography in, to consider whether the impacts of the educational cleavage are felt evenly across Britain today. It uses a multilevel modelling strategy to explore the extent to which individuals with identical qualifications voted differently in different kinds of constituencies at British general elections from 2015-2019. Taken together, the novel findings presented in these papers provide an exceptionally detailed picture of education’s role in the realignment of British politics and shed light on how, and why, graduates have become a distinctive electoral group. In doing so, this thesis not only makes an important contribution to the British political sociology literature, but also informs broader debate(s) about the educational realignment of the politics of advanced Western democracies.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Elizabeth Simon: orcid.org/0000-0001-8837-7061

ORCID for Gabriele Durrant: orcid.org/0009-0001-3436-1512

ORCID for William Jennings: orcid.org/0000-0001-9007-8896

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