The causal effect of education on political preferences: evidence from the UK's higher education expansion

In the UK, voting patterns in elections are increasingly characterised by division along education lines rather than by other demographic or economic variables (bar age). But does this reflect a causal relationship between education and party support? In this paper we estimate the causal effect of education on political preferences exploiting a large expansion in the supply of higher education in the UK as a result of the Further and Higher Education Act (1992). We use this exogenous policy change to instrument years of schooling and find that an additional year of (higher) education decreases the likelihood of voting for the right-of-centre Conservative party by 8.4 percentage points, and decreased the probability of voting ‘Leave’ in the 2016 Brexit referendum by 4.9pp.

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