Educational Level and Voting Behavior

IN THE UNITED States, education is one of the most important predictors of turnout and partisanship. Education enhances people's normative commitment toward the act of voting, as well as their political skills and interest, which in turn lead to a higher turnout. The interests and values of people with more education are differ from those of people with less education, and these differences are reflected in the way they vote. People with more education have a higher sense of civic duty, and a stronger allegiance to the political system. Voting is a crucial means to fulfilling this duty and affirming their allegiance. Additionally, education provides various political resources needed by voters in order to make informed choices. Moreover, in the United States, where the burden of registration falls on the voters, the process raises additional obstacles, ones that an educated person will find easier to overcome. In the United States, people with a college degree are twice as likely to vote than people with only a grammar school degree or less.

One important difference between the United States and other Western democracies is the lack of a significant socialist party, with strong ties to organized labor, to offer an institutional mechanism to mobilize the vote of the working class, thus compensating for lower levels of education. This can explain why the effect of education on turnout, observed in the United States, is absent in countries such as Britain, France, and Germany, which have this type of socialist party. On the other hand, education impacts turnout significantly in post-Communist countries such as Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In these cases, the lower turnout among less-educated voters can be attributed to the failure of the post-Communist left to organize and mobilize the working class.

Education is not only important for turnout, it is equally important as a determinant of policy preferences and partisan choice. In the past, education was positively related to support for right-wing or conservative parties, and this was true in both the United States and other democracies. At that time, the correlation between education and class or socioeconomic status was higher than it is now, though it is likely that this correlation was largely spurious: the better educated were also richer, and wealth was more important than education in explaining the preference of these people for candidates and parties opposing redistribution of income. Income and education must be treated as separate attributes, with distinct impacts on the vote, rather than aggregated in an overall measure of socioeconomic status or class. If separated, it becomes clear why, in the last few decades, many middle-class voters have shifted their support in favor of the Democratic Party, while a substantial number of upper-class voters have made a move in the opposite direction.

Educational level attained is one of the best predictors of voter turnout and partisanship.

The explanation lies in the increased salience of social issues, how the two major parties positioned themselves vis-a-vis these issues, and the voters' response to these developments. Policies related to abortion, the death penalty, gun control, or affirmative action have created a “New Politics” line of division between the parties, as opposed to the “Old Politics” dimension of purely economic conflicts, with Republicans in the conservative position and Democrats in the liberal position. In recent years, Americans have become slightly more conservative on economic issues, which worked to the Republicans' advantage. However, as Americans became better educated, they tended to be more liberal on social issues. The ambiguous relationship between education and the vote was illustrated in the last presidential election, when George W. Bush received 6 percent more votes than John Kerry among high school graduates, but Kerry had an 11 percent advantage over Bush among people with a graduate degree.

...