The Emergence of the Latent Educational Cleavage? A Longue Durée Analysis of Millions of Survey Reponses Across the Globe

Cleavages structure politics and societies. Most work has focused on the traditional Lipset-Rokkan cleavages. Yet, in today’s knowledge economies, arguably a new crucial cleavage is emerging: the educational cleavage. Today, education and skills affect almost every aspect of the economy, of society – and of politics. We increasingly witness systematic political differences between educational groups, increasingly developing into an enduring (latent) educational cleavage. Yet, our knowledge on this educational cleavage is meager, as existing work remains eclectically focused on specific phenomena, specific countries, or specific points in time. We don’t know to what extent we can speak of a cleavage at all, when this cleavage has emerged, whether it materializes in all countries to the same extent and at the same time, whether this cleavage materializes in each and every type of political preferences and behavior. This paper offers a parsimonious theoretical model and fresh empirical view by tracing the emergence of the educational cleavage over time, countries, and different types of preferences and behavior. We study to what extent and since when an educational cleavage has emerged, and whether it shows in any kind of preferences, attitudes, and behavior, or whether it is more visible in some than others. Thus, we comparatively analyze a large range of politically relevant phenomena: (1) preferences on first-dimension (economic) issues, (2) preferences on second-dimension social values issues, (3) ideological left-right positions, (4) “meta-level” preferences towards the political system, and (5) political engagement and political behavior. We combine survey data for over 4.5 million respondents from up to 120 countries over 70 years, going back as far as the 1970s. In a nutshell, the paper addresses the important questions whether, when, and why an educational cleavage has emerged, over what, and between which groups. It thus aims to contribute to a better understanding of politics in contemporary knowledge societies.