The causal effect of education on political preferences: Evidence from the UK’s higher education expansion

Matt Dickson and Kalyan Kumar Kameshwara

No 2025-07, Discussion Papers from Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP)

Abstract: We estimate the causal effect of education on political preferences exploiting a large expansion in the supply of higher education in the UK as a result of the Further and Higher Education Act (1992). We use this exogenous policy change to instrument years of schooling and find that an additional year of education decreases the likelihood of voting for the right-of-centre Conservative party by 8.4 percentage points, and decreased the probability of voting ‘Leave’ in the 2016 Brexit referendum by 4.9pp.

Date: 2025
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