Abstract
It is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons who grow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared with persons from high-status families. This paper examines whether reforms in education can help reduce this gap. We establish causality by exploiting a pilot scheme preceding a large reform of Swedish upper secondary education in the early 1990s, which gave rise to exogenous variation in educational attainment between individuals living in different municipalities or born in different years. Similar to recent studies employing credible identification strategies, we fail to find a statistically significant average effect of education on political participation. We move past previous studies, however, and show that the reform nevertheless contributed to narrowing the voting gap between individuals of different social backgrounds by raising turnout among those from low socioeconomic status households. The results thus square well with other recent studies arguing that education is particularly important for uplifting politically marginalized groups.
Highlights
I t is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons who grow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared with persons from high-status families
The analysis focuses on individuals in the lowest quartile of the family distribution who graduated from upper secondary school between 1973 and 2008.16 The upper graph shows the first-stage effect, 15 In Table A.5 in the Appendix we show that the instrumental variable (IV) estimate of completing a three-year program for Q1 (11.75) when restricting the analysis to students in vocational programs is very similar to the corresponding IV estimate in the full sample
In doing so for the 2010 election, we find that a one percentage point higher turnout among individuals in the lowest quartile of the family socioeconomic status (SES) distribution was associated with a 0.2–0.3 percentage points higher vote share difference between the left- and right-wing parties, holding voter turnout in other quartile groups constant (Table A.13)
Summary
I t is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons who grow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared with persons from high-status families. We move past previous studies, and show that the reform contributed to narrowing the voting gap between individuals of different social backgrounds by raising turnout among those from low socioeconomic status households. The reform helped reduce the overall voting gap related to family background by raising turnout at the lowest end of the socioeconomic spectrum. These results square well with recent research, which shows that the positive effect of civic education on political knowledge and interests mainly benefits politically marginalized groups (Campbell and Niemi 2016; Neundorf, Niemi, and Smets 2016)
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