Field of Education and the Transnational Cleavage

Abstract

Education is perhaps the most generally used independent variable for explaining public opinion and vote choice on the transnational cleavage. Yet the extent to which a person is educated, which is how we usually conceive of education in surveys, is just one way in which education may affect political beliefs and behaviour. Liesbet Hooghe suggests that the substantive field of education has an independent role to play over and above level, and uses cross-national evidence and panel data for a range of European countries alongside the United States to build her claim.