Degrees of influence: Educational inequality in policy representation

Abstract

Education plays an important role in the political, social and economic divisions that have recently characterised Western Europe. Despite the many analyses of education and its political consequences, however, previous research has not investigated whether government policy caters more to the preferences of the higher educated than to the preferences of the lower educated. We address this question using an original dataset of public opinion and government policy in the Netherlands. This data reveals that policy representation is starkly unequal. The association between support for policy change and actual change is much stronger for highly educated citizens than for low and middle educated citizens, and only the highly educated appear to have any independent influence on policy. This inequality extends to the economic and cultural dimensions of political competition. Our findings have major implications for the educational divide in Western Europe, as they reflect both a consequence and cause of this divide.

The party road to representation: Unequal responsiveness in party platforms

“…In a similar vein, controlling for government spending as a percentage of GDP in the six policy areas, measured at t , does not affect the main results (Table A9 of the Supporting Information). Moreover, controlling for micro‐level sources of potential omitted variable bias, particularly education (Schakel & Van der Pas, 2021), yields similar results to the baseline (Table A10 of the Supporting Information).…”

Education as identity? A meta-analysis of education-based in-group preferences in candidate choice experiments

“…Given that the politics of many advanced democracies are increasingly divided along educational lines (Abou-Chadi & Hix, 2021), and that the educational composition of these societies are rapidly changing, investigating the causes of university educated candidates' continuing over-representation in the political sphereand whether this is rooted in a sense of education-based conflict, identity and group consciousness -is both important and timely. This work helps understanding the extent to which inequalities in descriptive representation are likely to persist which, as demonstrated elsewhere (Lupu & Tirado Castro, 2022;Schakel & van der Pas, 2021), may well engender a policy responsiveness problem -with elite-level actors coming to prioritise equally socially advantaged and highly educated citizens over the rest of the population.…”

Partnerschap met gezinnen in armoede op beleids- of programmaniveau

“…Ook op beleidsniveau werken veel organisaties met formele cliënten-, burger-, Wmo-en participatieraden. Vaak blijken deze vormen niet goed aan te sluiten op de leefwereld en mogelijkheden van mensen in een achterstandssituatie [1][2][3]. Hoe kunnen mensen met een lager opleidingsniveau dan wel goed participeren op beleidsniveau?…”