Support for free-market policies and reforms: Does the field of study influence students' political attitudes?

Mira Fischer, Björn Kauder, Niklas Potrafke and Heinrich Ursprung

European Journal of Political Economy, 2017, vol. 48, issue C, 180-197

Abstract: Since opinion leaders are usually university graduates, the field of study has an influence on public support for economic policies and policy reforms intended to enhance efficiency because advocating such policies often requires appreciation of the beneficial roles of markets and economic freedom. We investigate whether the field of study influences German university students' political attitudes. We disentangle self-selection from learning effects and reveal systematic differences between incoming students' political attitudes across eight fields of study. In a second step we explore how the students' political attitudes change as they progress in their academic training. Only studying economics has an unambiguous pro-market influence on political attitudes: by the time of graduation, economics students are some 6.2 percentage points more likely than they were in their initial year of study to agree with free-market policy positions. Studying humanities and natural sciences has a pro-leftist influence.

Keywords: Indoctrination; Nature versus nurture; Political socialization; Political attitudes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268016300672
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Support for free-market policies and reforms: Does the field of study influence students' political attitudes? (2017)
Working Paper: Support for free-market policies and reforms: Does the field of study influence students’ political attitudes? (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:48:y:2017:i:c:p:180-197

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2016.07.002

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().