Schooling, the higher educated and political trust: Critical citizens, universal democratizers, or defenders of the political system?

Educational attainment is a key predictor of various forms of political attitudes and trust. Classically, tertiary educated people have been found to have higher levels of confidence in political institutions, been more satisfied with the political system, and are more in support of democratic values and organizations than the primary or secondary educated. However, most of the existing research regarding the position of the tertiary educated has been conducted in Western and democratic countries. Contrary to the widely held assumptions about the democratic power of schooling, recent evidence shows that tertiary educated ‘middle class’ people living in autocratic regimes also show high support for the political system and thus autocracy and authoritarianism. These findings thus indicate the need for a revision of the ‘education effect’ regarding political trust. Often employed in the state administration, public offices and the larger public sector, the tertiary educated strongly depend on the state for their social position and life chances. Consequently, they are likely to defend the ruling institutions. Simultaneously, many countries in the contemporary world are developing into ‘schooled societies’, in which schooling has become a central and primary institution. In these societies, expanded school-based education has become an authoritative basis for social stratification, granting the tertiary educated an expert status and a dominant position in society. Consequentially, these societies have become ‘diploma democracies’, in which the tertiary educated dominate the political domain. In such societies, the tertiary educated are likely to be defenders of the political system as well. Following this reasoning, in this paper, we examine the relationship between the development of schooled societies, educational attainment, being employed in the public vs. private sector, and political trust. To answer these questions, we conducted multilevel cross-national analyses. Initial exploratory results based on data from the last waves of the World Values Survey and European Values Study from 102,389 respondents across 85 countries (including countries with autocratic regimes) revealed that (1) in general, the tertiary educated have more confidence in the public institutions than non-tertiary educated people and that (2) this is especially true for the tertiary educated working in public institutions. Simultaneously, (3) in more schooled societies, the tertiary educated have on average more political trust than in weakly schooled societies, while non-tertiary educated people have a lot less confidence in the political institutions in the former as compared to the latter societies. Finally, (4) for the non-tertiary educated, this is true regardless of the sector of occupation. Yet, for the tertiary educated, their increased political trust in strongly schooled societies does not hold for those working in public institutions, who displayed high trust regardless of how schooled the society was. The extent of schooling of a society mainly benefitted higher educated in private institutions the most, who display significantly more trust in strongly schooled societies than in weakly schooled societies. Together, this implies that in schooled societies political trust is more polarized between tertiary and non-tertiary educated, and the tertiary educated themselves display more homogeneity across employment sectors.