The Emergence of the Latent Educational Cleavage – A longue durée analysis

Cleavages structure our societies and political systems. While most work has focused on the four traditional Lipset-Rokkan cleavages (capital-labor, state-church, rural-urban, center-periphery), newer work has pointed at the emergence of a potential new cleavage: the educational cleavage. In today’s knowledge-based economies, characterized by massive educational expansion, transformative labor market change, and knowledge-based growth, education and skills increasingly form the crucial backbone of countries’ socio-economic systems. These transformations have not come without challenges, though, as they also triggered large-scale repercussions in the political landscapes. We increasingly witness conflict over education and between groups with different kinds of education and skills (low- vs. high-skill groups; workers with routine tasks vs. creative; science-focused technocrats vs. populists), with crucial differences in preferences, behavior, perceptions, and identities. Yet, while many agree that fundamental socio-economic and political change has happened, our knowledge on this potential educational cleavage is still meager. We don’t know to what extent we can speak of a cleavage at all, whether it materializes in all countries, and – if so – when this cleavage has emerged. This paper offers a fresh empirical view by tracing the emergence of the educational cleavage over time, analyzing the relationship between education with political preferences and behavior in the longest available survey data. We want to know to what extent and since when an educational cleavage has emerged. In order to trace this development, we turn towards long-term survey data. First, we use high-quality repeated cross-sectional country-comparative surveys, going back to the 1980s (ISSP, Eurobarometer, EVS/WVS) to study changes over the last 40 years. Second, we currently work to use data even going back further in time, exploiting the Gallup surveys (in North America) going back to the 1940s and allowing analysis over the entire post-war period. Third, we might turn towards harmonized international panel surveys to get closer at the causal processes. Our working hypotheses are that (1) an educational cleavage exists, but that it has not yet materialized to the same extent as previous cleavages – it crucially structures today’s politics, but it remains more “in the background”. Therefore, we speak of a “latent” educational cleavage. (2) Second, we posit that this cleavage has become increasingly visible over time, being related to the transformative shift towards the post-industrial knowledge society. (3) Third, we expect a certain reconfiguration of this cleavage over time, since the access to – and accordingly the meaning of – education, particularly higher education, has fundamentally changed over time, changing (higher) education from an elitist good to a mass good that the majority of all people in younger cohorts benefit from.