The education cleavage posits high educated individuals who support gender equality, egalitarian gender norms and tolerance toward immigrants against low educated individuals who support more traditional gender roles and are more xenophobic. This divide encompasses attitudes, socio-structural position and voting behaviour for GAL versus TAN parties. However, multidimensional attitude patterns such as ‘sexually modern nativists’ complicate this divide. If individuals adopt more and more ambivalent attitudes over time, it may weaken attitude conflicts across educational groups. In the public discourse, a growing polarization of cultural attitudes is proclaimed neglecting multidimensional attitudes. In this vein, high educated should become ever more egalitarian and tolerant and low educated should become ever more traditional and intolerant.
Studying multidimensional attitude change help us understand how educational groups combine gender and immigration attitudes in the first place, and how these combinations evolve over time.
Taking a longitudinal perspective on attitude change, I use LISS panel data from the Netherlands and study attitudes towards gender roles and immigration across 15 waves between 2008 and 2024. The Netherlands are particularly suitable as they have a growing educational expansion, powerful and competitive populist right-wing parties and mixed immigration and family policies.
I first conduct a latent profile analysis addressing the general association between gender and immigration attitudes. Next, I test whether one attitude model holds for both educational groups and finally, I model intra-individual attitude change with latent profile transition models. The latent variable technique estimates attitudinal groups for each wave as well as the transitions between attitudinal groups from one wave to the next thus tracing individuals’ attitude movements over time.
Preliminary results show that attitude patterns differ between low and high educated groups, however, the attitude divide is not growing over time. Substantially, both groups show three attitude types, egalitarian, moderate egalitarian and ambivalent gender attitudes combined with thoroughly ambivalent immigration attitudes. High educated have higher shares of egalitarian-ambivalent attitudes, whereas low educated are more ambivalent in their attitudes. Over time, egalitarian-ambivalent attitudes are growing among both educational groups. In the Netherlands, gender attitudes vary, whereas immigration attitudes are very ambivalent.
