Last Word: The Politics of Britain’s Educational Divide
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20419058231181292 |
| Author | Elizabeth Simon |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
40POLITICAL INSIGHT•JUNE 2023
Last Word
Education has become one of the
starkest dividing lines in British
politics. Graduates not only tend to
think dierently to non-graduates but
to vote dierently, too. The striking magnitude
of these education-based vote dierentials was
exposed by the 2016 referendum, in which
the vast majority of graduates voted Remain
while only a small minority of those with no
qualications elected to stay in the European
Union. This divide has not subsided since, with
stark ‘educational gaps’ also observed in 2017
and 2019 General Election voting.
In the UK, 30 per cent of people reported
having at least at undergraduate degree,
according to the 2022 British Election Study
(BES, Fieldhouse et al., 2022). But while
an educational divide clearly exists at the
objective level of British politics, we know little
about how it manifests at the subjective level,
in the minds of electors. The vast expansions
of higher education provision which have
taken place in recent decades have rendered
education an ever-more important source
of social stratication and segregation in
advanced Western democracies. Those with
university degrees now not only tend to
dominate the professional and managerial
occupations, to earn more and live in dierent
kinds of places than their non-graduate
counterparts, but also scarcely meet and
mingle outside their cohorts. Unsurprisingly,
this has driven an increasing sense that the
graduate and non-graduate groups have
dierent, and conicting, political interests.
Educational consciousness
BES data from 2018 shows 62 per cent of
respondents felt their level of education was
important to their sense of who they were.
Only age and life stage were considerably
more consequential than education. That we
appear to attach just as much, and sometimes
more, importance to our educational level
in determining our sense of self as we do to
other socio-demographic characteristics which
have traditionally been considered important
axes of identity formation (e.g., gender, locality
and occupation) provides strong evidence
to suggest the existence of an sense of
education-based identity in Britain today.
But even education-based identity is
divided by respondents’ education: just 54
per cent of non-graduates report their level of
education is important to their sense of who
they are compared to 80 per cent of graduates.
This suggests a clear, and strong, sense of
identication with the education-based in-
group among graduates.
The evidence pertaining to non-graduates
is less clear. The relatively lower level of
educational identity among this group may
be driven by a psychological need to preserve
self-esteem, given there is less to be gained,
in this respect, by identifying with ‘their own’
group in a highly educationally stratied
society. It may also represent an eort by
non-graduates to diminish the graduate
group’s status and maintain a sense of positive
distinctiveness by distancing ‘their group’ from
the out-group through actively choosing to
de-value the importance of education. The
lower level of educational identity reported
among the non-graduate group may then
represent a sense of attachment to, and
desire to bolster the status of, ‘their own’
education-based in-group. Regardless of which
explanation is most appropriate, our education
not only determines the way we see ourselves,
but shapes the way we perceive others,
and whether we interpret these inter-group
relations as conictual.
This sense of education-based identity and
consciousness has become politicised. Non-
graduates without any sense of educational
identity were almost ten percentage points
more likely to vote Conservative in 2019, and
vote Leave in 2016, than those who exhibited
this identity. Graduates with a sense of
educational identity, on the other hand, were
The Politics of Britain’s
Educational Divide
Elizabeth Simon explores one of the most prominent cleavages in
British politics today: between graduates and non-graduates.
around ten percentage points more likely to
vote Labour in 2019 than those without this.
Education-based conceptions of ‘us’ and
‘them’ also engender biases in candidate
selection. When presented with pairs of
hypothetical MPs, in a 2015 BES survey
experiment, the graduate group showed no
preference between voting for (non-)graduate
candidates. The non-graduate group, however,
expressed a clear (though non-signicant)
preference for electing one of ‘their own’, at the
expense of the out-group. Research suggests
that any tendency of non-graduates to prefer
an in-group candidate is likely driven by their
sense that one of ‘their own’ will understand
the problems they face better than one of the
graduate out-group.
Conclusions
The objective educational divide in British
politics has clearly become internalised in the
minds of electors. Individuals have not only
formed educational identities but developed
a sense of consciousness centred around their
education-based social group membership.
As such they have come to view these inter-
group relations as characterised by conict
and thus, to exhibit biases against educational
in- and out-groups.
Understanding that the British educational
divide has deeply rooted, psychological
underpinnings is important. Firstly, because
it suggests this cleavage is likely to be stable
and enduring, and will continue to shape the
landscape of British politics for decades to
come, and secondly, because it demonstrates
that education-based polarisation has real
potential to constitute a threat to social
cohesion and the functioning of British
democracy. For all these reasons we need to
better understand the subjective side of this
educational divide, and its social and political
consequences.
Reference
Fieldhouse, E., J. Green, G. Evans, J. Mellon & C.
Prosser, J. Bailey, R. de Geus, H. Schmitt and C. van
der Eijk (2022) British Election Study Internet Panel
Waves 1-23. DOI: 10.5255/UKDA-SN-8810-1.
Elizabeth Simon is a Post-Doctoral
Researcher in British Politics within the Mile
End Institute and the School of Politics and
International Relations at Queen Mary,
University of London.
Political Insight June 2023.indd 40Political Insight June 2023.indd 4018/05/2023 14:5918/05/2023 14:59
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