Does university make you more liberal? Estimating the within-individual effects of higher education on political values

Abstract

An individual's level of education is increasingly significant in explaining their political attitudes and behaviour, with higher education proposed as a new political cleavage. However, there is limited evidence on the causal effect of university on political attitudes, due to self-selection into educational pathways. Addressing this gap, this article estimates the change in political values that occurs within individuals who graduate from university by applying longitudinal modelling techniques to data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, overcoming the selection problem by accounting for time-invariant confounding. It provides the first causal estimate of higher education specifically, finding that achieving a degree reduces authoritarianism and racial prejudice and increases economic right-wing attitudes. This has important implications for the study of politics: as populations become more highly educated on average, we should expect continuing aggregate value change towards lower levels of authoritarianism and racial prejudice, with significant consequences for political behaviour.

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