Classified out of society? How educational classification induces political alienation through feelings of misrecognition.

Less educated citizens are both descriptively and substantively outnumbered by higher educated citizens in political and societal institutions. While social science has devoted much time to explain why such education effects exist, it has largely neglected the role of feelings of misrecognition in inducing political alienation among less educated citizens. We argue that education has become so central in processes of economic and social stratification that it is likely that less educated citizens feel misrecognized due to their marginal presence in societal and political institutions, which would then lead to their political alienation. This would in particular be the case in societies that are more 'schooled', that is, societies where schooling is a more dominant and steering institution. We analysed data from 49,261 individuals in 34 European countries and found that feelings of misrecognition were strongly related to political distrust, dissatisfaction with democracy, and vote abstention. These relations explained a significant part of the difference between higher and less educated citizens in political alienation. We also found that this mediation effect was larger in countries that are more schooled.

Conflict thinking: Exploring the social basis of perceiving the world through the lens of social conflict.

Both human rights organisations and studies in political communication have noticed an increasing use of conflict frames in contemporary politics within Western societies. As such frames are only interesting for political actors if they find resonance among a substantial share of the population, these observations raise the question as to who supports conflict thinking and why? Whereas public opinion research has studied many attitudes that are based on conflict thinking (e.g., ethnic prejudice, populism, feelings of collective deprivation, and welfare chauvinism), this paper addresses the more fundamental question as to whether it is possible to measure people's general tendency to perceive the world through the lens of social conflict. Data from the European Quality of Life Survey (34,655 respondents; 34 countries) reveal strong correlations between the perceptions of the amount of tension between seven pairs of groups. These correlations are combined into a single scale reflecting the amount of perceived social conflict in society. Subsequent multilevel analyses support the claim that conflict thinking is embedded in different feelings of vulnerability. In the conclusion, we elaborate on the implications of our findings.

When and Why People Prefer Higher Educated Politicians: Ingroup Bias, Deference, and Resistance.

When choosing between political candidates of different educational levels, do voters show ingroup bias or base their vote choice on candidates' perceived competence? We aim to investigate how (fictional) political candidates of different educational levels are evaluated and voted for, how this is affected by voters' educational level, and the role of perceived (Study 1) and manipulated competence (Study 2). Higher educated participants preferred higher to less educated candidates over and above their level of competence, particularly when they identified strongly with their educational level. This reflects ingroup bias among the higher educated. Less educated participants preferred higher educated candidates in Study 1, but did not prefer higher educated candidates when competence was manipulated independently from education in Study 2. The less educated, unlike the higher educated, therefore, seem to show deference to the assumed competence of the higher educated, because it disappears when more reliable competence information is available.

Affective Polarization and Political Belief Systems: The Role of Political Identity and the Content and Structure of Political Beliefs.

We investigate the extent that political identity, political belief content (i.e., attitude stances), and political belief system structure (i.e., relations among attitudes) differences are associated with affective polarization (i.e., viewing ingroup partisans positively and outgroup partisans negatively) in two multinational, cross-sectional studies (Study 1 N = 4,152, Study 2 N = 29,994). First, we found a large, positive association between political identity and group liking-participants liked their ingroup substantially more than their outgroup. Second, political belief system content and structure had opposite associations with group liking: Sharing similar belief system content with an outgroup was associated with more outgroup liking, but similarity with the ingroup was associated with less ingroup liking. The opposite pattern was found for political belief system structure. Thus, affective polarization was greatest when belief system content similarity was low and structure similarity was high.