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

Abstract

In a political climate where education stratifies democratic electorates, does having a university degree universally pay dividends at the polls or is there an education premium, whereby the more politically active, educated class disproportionately vote for one of "their own"? Via a meta-analysis and original subgroup heterogeneity test of fifteen candidate choice conjoint experiments from nine democracies, we demonstrate that political candidates with university-level education boast a five percentage-point bump in preferability over their peers who have not attended university. Consistent with emerging evidence of educational attainment stratifying citizens into distinct social identity groups, we find evidence of significant in-group bias among degree-holders. Those who have attended university are far more inclined to place a premium on candidates' membership of their educational in-group and penalise those from the less-educated out-group vis-à-vis those who haven't gone to university. Not only do these results signal the sizeable premium that citizens place on education in the candidate favourability calculus, but they demonstrate that the over-representation of university graduates on the corridors of our democratic institutions is the product of demand- rather than supply-side forces. As levels of university attendance continue to rise, the biasing effect of education in shaping preferences towards candidates is likely to result in the continued dominance of degree-holding representatives in democratic institutions.