The Politics of the Latent Educational Cleavage

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One of the most important changes of the last 200 years is the massive educational expansion and the related shift from industrial to post-industrial societies in countries around the globe. This educational revolution has reshaped our societies and economies. But it also transformed politics: Nowadays, education affects almost every aspect of politics. A new systematic conflict line has emerged: the educational cleavage. Its emergence has not gone unnoticed. But existing research remains scattered across disciplines and subfields and has not developed into a comprehensive research agenda yet. POLEDUC offers a comprehensive research agenda on the POlitics of the Latent EDUcational Cleavage across countries, over time, and across three analytical levels: the micro-level of individuals’ attitudes, perceptions, identities, and behavior; the meso-level of organized political actors; and the macro-level of (unequal) representation in the politics of policy-making. POLEDUC develops a unified multi-dimensional theoretical framework and offers novel, ground-breaking empirical analyses, combining quantitative, qualitative, and experimental state-of-the-art methods. On the micro-level, POLEDUC uses existing and conducts new public opinion surveys to study the educational cleavage across countries and over time, surveying the general population and higher education students in particular. On the meso-level, we analyze the party politics of the educational cleavage using qualitative and machine learning tools plus an expert survey. On the macro-level we explore whether and why policy-makers are increasingly responsive to more educated citizens, using comparative case studies. Overall, POLEDUC studies a phenomenon of utmost social and scientific relevance. It breaks new theoretical and empirical ground on a core cleavage of contemporary politics, uncovering a defining feature of modern democracy and contributing novel insights to several fields and disciplines.