The Effect of Educational Subjects on Support for the European Union

The causal role of education in shaping political attitudes and behaviours – including support for the European Union – has received extensive attention in recent years (Cavaillé and Marshall 2019, Sobolewska and Ford 2020, Kunst et al 2020). However, measurement of education is often limited in political surveys, with little detail beyond the highest level of qualification achieved. As a consequence, the mechanisms underlying attitude formation through education in early life are less clear. Specifically, the effects of educational content and curriculum, and of different subjects at both the secondary and university level are overall not well-understood. We add to the literature on education effects by asking whether exposure to particular school subjects during adolescence affects political attitudes later in life, e.g. does taking more foreign languages, or social science and humanities subjects in school lead to more pro-European attitudes? What is the effect of a focus on engineering, or economics or business studies? We use new administrative and survey data to address these questions. Specifically, we are able to link detailed administrative data on adults’ school records including a breakdown of subjects and marks to their political views in a large-scale probability household panel survey. We then use education reforms in England that affected the subjects offered to students in different schools to disentangle the effect of self-selection into different pathways from the direct effect of educational content on support for European Union. In a second study we use existing cross-national data to estimate the effect of higher education field on EU support. Both studies find substantial differences between education subjects or higher education field in terms of support for the European Union.