The State and its Schooled Elite: How the Education Effect on Political Trust Depends on the Status Afforded to the Higher Educated Through the Schooled Society or State Jobs

Educational attainment is an essential variable predicting political trust. Indeed, the higher educated have consistently been found to have higher levels of trust in political institutions than the less educated. In this study, we engage with a line of work that argues that this ‘education effect’ is conditional on the worldwide development of ‘schooled societies’, in which schooling has become a central institution that authoritatively influences how society is structured and organized. Schooling as a key institution in modern societies grants the higher educated a dominant position in society and the political field. In schooled societies, the saliency of educational differences in political life is related to the development of an education-based intergroup conflict, in which the higher educated are highly supportive of the political system. At the same time, the less educated are politically alienated, and both groups are relatively highly homogenous regarding such political attitudes. Simultaneously, in less strongly schooled societies, the ‘education effect’ may be more ambiguous. Since the societal and political status of higher educated people is more unstable and contingent on their dependency on the state apparatus, there may be a large gap in political trust between those who are publicly employed and those who are not. Following this reasoning, we examined the relationship between educational attainment, the development of schooled societies, sector of employment, and political trust. To that end, we employed the ‘schooled society index’, an indicator that measures cross-national variation in the centrality of schooling in society. We combined this index with data from the last waves of the World Values Survey and European Values Study. Cross-national multilevel analyses across 84 countries (Nindividual=102,102) revealed that (1) the schooled society index moderated the relationship between educational attainment and political trust. In (1.1) strongly schooled societies, the higher educated had higher levels of political trust than the less educated. (1.2) This relationship was reversed in less strongly schooled societies. Next, (2) we found that it were especially the higher educated working for public institutions that had high levels of political trust, while the non-publicly employed higher educated were generally less trusting of the public institutions. Finally, (3) we found that in less strongly schooled societies, there was an important gap in terms of political trust between the higher educated, depending on whether or not they were publicly employed. In these societies, (3.1) higher educated citizens who did not work for public institutions were relatively distrusting of the political system. (3.2) Higher educated employed in the public sector, on the other hand, displayed high levels of political trust, regardless of how schooled a society was. In other words, the development of schooled society mainly affected the political trust of the non-publicly employed higher educated, who displayed significantly more trust in strongly than in weakly schooled societies. All this implies that in schooled societies, political trust is more polarized between the higher and less educated and depends less on the sector of employment. In terms of political trust, education-based groups were thus more homogeneous as well.