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

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.

Introduction

Market-oriented economic policies and reforms are usually pursued by right-wing governments. In OECD countries and countries in Central and Eastern Europe, for example, right-wing governments have launched privatization and deregulation policies, and have promoted economic freedom in general. Left-wing governments, on the other hand, were more hesitant in promoting public sector outsourcing and economic freedom.¹ If it takes market-oriented ruling parties to conceive of and follow through with market-oriented economic policies and reforms, the question arises as to what influences electoral support for market-oriented parties. We investigate to what extent political attitudes are shaped by education. In particular, we ask whether the field of study influences university students' political attitudes. This research question has already been addressed half a century ago by George Stigler (1959) who has appreciated the complexity of the issue by remarking that “(t)he isolation of the net effect of scientific training upon the policy views of a man is a most difficult task”.

Political economists have traditionally assumed that observed heterogeneity in political attitudes reflects different economic interests, a view that plainly contradicts John Maynard Keynes' famous dictum “that the power of vested interests is vastly exag-gerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas” (General Theory, chapter 24, part V). If it is true that political attitudes are, at least to some extent, independent of a person's vested interests, investigating the formation of ideology-based political attitudes emerges as an important topic of political-economic research. Our study contributes to this promising research program.

We propose that early adulthood is a particularly interesting period of life for studying political socialization because political attitudes are unlikely to consolidate before the age at which young people have seriously discussed political issues for some time and have had the opportunity to exercise political rights. Political attitudes may, of course, be largely based on more fundamental values that become settled at an earlier age; examples are political trust and attitudes towards immigrants, both of which have been shown to be already well established by the age of 14 (Hooghe and Wilkenfeld, 2008). The process of bundling individual value judgments into comprehensive ideologies requires however time; early adulthood is therefore certainly a good candidate for the age at which political attitudes begin to solidify.

Assuming that the possibly immature political attitudes of high school graduates are already sufficiently strong, it is to be expected that students select themselves into academic programs that correspond, either in the subject matter or in the ensuing profession, with their political attitudes. This kind of self-selection would imply that the students' political attitudes vary across fields of study already among the incoming students. Our first hypothesis thus puts forward that self-selection into academic programs according to political attitudes is likely to be manifest in all fields of study.

When do ideology-based political attitudes begin to consolidate? We hypothesize that the political preferences of young adults may still undergo systematic changes as they progress in their university studies. If political attitudes have not settled by the age at which university students usually commence their studies, the question arises as to whether the observed subsequent changes in political attitudes systematically depend on the students' field of study. Our second hypothesis maintains that in disciplines that provide deeper insights into the modes of social interaction, the workings of political processes, the codification and enforcement of public policies, and the overall effects of these policies, a systematic influence of the university training on the students' political attitudes is to be expected. Since economics deals with all of these four issues, we hypothesize that economics students are especially likely to integrate their newly acquired expertise into their political attitudes. For other academic disciplines that focus more on social interaction (social sciences), political processes (political science), codification and enforcement (law), or the effects of specific policies (health policy in medicine, environmental policies in the natural sciences and engineering, etc.) it is much less apparent that students realign their political attitudes with their newly acquired knowledge.

We test these hypotheses with the help of an extensive pseudo-panel survey of German university students. Starting in the academic year 1982/83, twelve waves of the survey have been conducted up to now. All waves, with the exception of the last one (in 2012/13), comprise data on > 8000 students. The number of observations in our data set thus exceeds the sample size of comparable student surveys by an order of magnitude. Exploiting the large number of observations and covariates, we find systematic differences between the students' political attitudes across eight fields of study. These differences can in many cases be attributed to self-selection of the students into fields of study that they deem congruent with the political attitudes they hold when entering university. Even though self-selection also plays an important role in economics, the subsequent professional training has, in contrast to other academic disciplines, an unambiguous and rather strong influence on the economics students' political attitudes as they progress in their professional training. This last result thus corroborates the main hypothesis advanced by Stigler (1959).