Field of Education and Voting in the United States

• In Event: The Role of Education in Shaping Contemporary Political Divides

Abstract

Education is perhaps the most generally used independent variable in the fields of public opinion and vote choice. Yet the extent to which a person is educated, which is the predominant way in which education is conceived in surveys, is just one way in which education may affect political beliefs and behavior. In this paper we construct and validate a new continuous measure of field of education and apply it to vote choice in the US. Under controls for gender, race, location, age, religion, occupation, and income, we find that field of education has an independent and substantively important effect on Democratic and Republican partisanship.

Authors

• Liesbet Hooghe, UNC - Chapel Hill

• Julia SchulteCloos, LMU Munich

• Jonne Kamphorst, European University Institute

• Gary Marks, UNC - Chapel Hill