The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Empty Category from their Empty Diagonal.
We ponder, in our politics section, why education has become such a big predictor of political behaviour? Where does the divide come from and what can progressives do about it?
And of course, there’s the Friday University of Life that is Charlie’s Attic, which this week asks what it’s like to win a seat by coin toss.
We read with interest this recent piece for PsyPost. It is based on research into findings from the run-up to the 2020 US election, using analysis of written narratives by voters. It reveals that Trump supporters “used language that was more positive, less cognitively complex, and suggested a simplistic and categorical way of thinking.”
This linked to a related article, here in the UK, by James Kirkup. Published in light of the recent local elections, Kirkup suggests that education is emerging as the biggest source of political division. Citing Labour’s capture of Wandsworth Council, he predicts that “left vs right is going to become increasingly irrelevant, as grad vs non-grad takes over as a major point of political tension.”
It can be easy for liberals and left-wingers to glory in these findings, suggesting that they vindicate progressive politics. Yet this is a huge error. Having better qualifications – or having higher levels of verbal dexterity – is not the same as being smarter. If it was then liberals would have done a better job of bringing non-graduates with them in the past few years.
A recent Progressive Britain essay, authored by Godfather of the Weekly, Chris Clarke, makes this point (read as a PDF, a long read blog or an e-book). He argues that education has become the coronary article of UK politics during the 2010s (see chart above). And he suggests that the George Lakoff distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘systemic’ reasoning helps to explain why. Education encourages people to engage in structural critiques, which are not intuitive and which sometimes prevent them from ‘thinking in straight lines. The divide that has opened up in British politics is as much about vocabulary as about values.
It is sometimes taken as a given that more educated voters are more liberal. Yet a follow-up question is why?
Chris’s analysis is only a small part of the answer. But as voters become more socially liberal in line with greater access to higher education – and as education polarises as a result – it is worth us trying to examine the reasons that this link exists in the first place.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, where plain English meets gobbledygook:
