Political interest and education-based group dynamics in globalized schooled society: A cross-national location-scale analysis

Educational attainment is a key predictor of various forms of political involvement. Against the background of discussions concerning the growth of ‘diploma democracies’, scholars have started to interpret these educational differences in political involvement as the outcome of intergroup processes. It is argued that the political dominance of the higher educated and the lack of the (substantive and descriptive) representation of the lower educated has led to a growing political awareness of educational differences among the public at large. This awareness is thought to deepen existing educational differentials in political involvement. Although persuading at first sight, so far the emerging literature on the development of such education-based political group behavior is based on case studies and lacks a genuine comparative perspective. This paper aims to fill that gap. We first argue that the growth of diploma democracy itself is part and parcel of a much broader development referred to as the growth of ‘schooled society’, a global tendency whereby education gradually becomes a central and authoritative institution. Characterized by a deep belief in the necessity of schooling for development, expanded education has become a legitimate basis for the allocation of people to societal positions and status, granting feelings of entitlement to the higher educated and thus providing a source of (self-)categorization processes. Following this line of thought, we seek to answer the question whether in more schooled societies educational groups grow apart at the intergroup level, while at the same time becoming more homogeneous at the intragroup level. After having constructed a country-level indicator that comprehensively measures cross-national variation in the development of schooled society, we examine (1) the relationship between educational attainment and political interest, (2) the variation in this relationship according to the development of schooled society, and (3) whether, when education becomes a more central institution, educational groups become more homogeneous in terms of political interest. To answer these questions, we conducted three-level location-scale analyses. This means that we simultaneously analyze the contextual effects of education on both the between-group mean (location) and the within-group variance (scale) of educational groups’ political interest. Results based on data from the World Values Survey and European Values Study from 148,869 respondents living in 108 countries revealed that the increased centrality of education in a country was not associated with higher political interest at the aggregate level. However, we did find that (1) individual-level educational attainment was consistently positively related to average political interest. Moreover, (2) this educational gap in political interest widened as societies became more ‘schooled’. Interestingly, this tendency was not only due to the increased political interest of the higher educated, but also to the political detachment of the lower educated. Finally, at the same time with this education-based divergence, (3) the variance of each educational group in terms of political interest decreased. All in all, then, the rise of schooled society seems to have made educational attainment a basis for group dynamics, in which increasingly homogeneous educational groups grow apart.