Support for free-market policies and reforms: Does the field of study influence students' political attitudes?

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractSince opinion leaders are usually university graduates, the field of study has an influence on public support for economic policies and policy reforms intended to enhance efficiency because advocating such policies often requires appreciation of the beneficial roles of markets and economic freedom. We investigate whether the field of study influences German university students' political attitudes. We disentangle self-selection from learning effects and reveal systematic differences between incoming students' political attitudes across eight fields of study. In a second step we explore how the students' political attitudes change as they progress in their academic training. Only studying economics has an unambiguous pro-market influence on political attitudes: by the time of graduation, economics students are some 6.2 percentage points more likely than they were in their initial year of study to agree with free-market policy positions. Studying humanities and natural sciences has a pro-leftist influence.JEL Code: A13, A22, B40, D01, Z13.

Sociopolitical values, attitudes and behaviors of Portuguese economics students

“…he vigorously warns the reader in the very beginning of chapter 12, bombastically named "The curse of economics" (2002 [1998]: 354). As opposed to these views, Fischer et al (2016) claim that, although economics teaching does indeed produce a free-marketeering bias, this should not be attributed to an indoctrinating effect, but instead to a learning one: the students are supposedly not "brainwashed", and thus the free-marketer ideas are arguably not "hammered" into their brains: "An alternative interpretation would be that students acquire information that induces them to realign their political attitudes with their newly acquired knowledge. In this case, the training effect should rather be referred to as a learning effect" (id.…”

“…These are, to be sure, by no means questions easy to arbitrate. For example, Schulze (1998, 2000), Lanteri (2008) and Elegido (2009) assign such free-marketeering and free-riding trends mostly to nature and self-selection, and so do Rowen and Dietrich (2007), at least predominantly, whereas au contraire Varoufakis (2002Varoufakis ( [1998) and also Núñez, Miranda and Scavia (2007) decide resolutely for education/nurture, Haucap and Just (2003), Sjöberg and Engelberg (2006), López-Pérez and Spiegelman (2012) and Fischer et al (2016) opt instead for a merely "agnostic" position, or really suggest a more "middle-of-the-road" one, recognizing the presence of both natural (self-selection) and nurture (education) influences, although reasserting the higher free-riding proclivity amongst economics students. Goossens and Méon (2010) also subscribe a middle-of-the-road position, although they notice the somewhat mysterious tendency of economics teaching to likewise produce a higher degree of homogeneity within the profession: "we observe that the answers of economics students tend to become more homogeneous over time.…”

Ação afirmativa e desejabilidade social

“…Áreas de conhecimento possuem valores, crenças e normas predominantes que podem influenciar nas atitudes políticas de alunos universitários (Hastie, 2007;Fischer et al, 2017). Estudos vêm mostrando que há uma tendência de alunos de cursos de ciências sociais e de ciências humanas terem uma orientação sociopolítica mais tolerante com grupos minoritários e serem mais favoráveis a programas de bem-estar social do que alunos de engenharias (Hastie, 2007).…”

US aid, US educated leaders and economic ideology

“…Since some elites themselves are educated in a donor country, they themselves may take-on spreading these values in the home country such as democracy (Mercier 2016, Gift andKrcmaric 2015) Moreover, the literature shows that country's fiscal, economic and political performance (Hicks, Hicks andMaldonado 2016, Hayo andNeumeier, 2014, Dreher and Jensen 2013, Jones and Olken 2005) depends on certain characteristics and background of leaders. Moreover, it shows that the field of study may also influence shaping of leader's economic ideology (Fischer, et al 2017), and leaders that studied in western democracies are more likely to bring democratic values back home (Mercier 2016, Gift andKrcmaric 2015).…”