Education, belief structures, support for welfare policies, and vote

Abstract

This paper investigates how education affects 1) the structure of beliefs toward social policies, defined as the correlation between attitudes in areas such as education, health, income redistribution, and social security, and 2) the relationship between that belief structure and vote on parties of different ideological affiliations. It is shown that the accumulation of schooling is associated with more structured attitudes. Moreover, in case of structured attitudes that gain an ideological content in favor/against social policies, it is only when schooling is high that these positions are strongly associated with voting for left/right parties. The analysis is based on opinion surveys conducted in 2016 in more than thirty countries.