As the twig is bent, the tree is inclined? The role of parental versus own education for openness towards globalisation

Abstract

Citizens with higher levels of education are consistently found to be more open to immigration and European integration than those with less education. However, the literature has neglected the issue of whether educational divides in anti-globalisation sentiment result from people's own educational attainment or whether they are a consequence of deep-rooted positions of disadvantage across generations. In this article, we address the question to what extent the attitudes towards globalisation of intergenerationally mobile citizens, that is, those who obtain a different educational outcome than one's parents, adapt to the newly acquired social position or remain attached to the parental milieu. We apply diagonal reference models to study the influence of one's own and parental education level on attitudes to globalisation in 26 European countries using the European Social Survey between 2008 and 2018. Our results indicate that while mobile citizens adjust their attitudes to the achieved education level, there remains an enduring influence of the education level of origin. In addition, we find that the importance of parental educational attainment does not depend on the social fluidity between education levels within countries. Consequently, this study has important implications for studying political socialisation and the future of the educational divide over globalisation.

Promoting Effective Political Socialisation Strategies for Youth Leadership Development among Universiti Putra Malaysia Student Leaders

“…Student leaders are trained to relate with each member, understand their peculiarities and foster cooperation with a view to achieving shared goals. By implication, people with higher levels of education are expected to be more open to globalisation due to exposure to liberal values in education (Kunst et al, 2023). Having good knowledge of the group members helps youth leaders to coordinate group activities, "assign certain members to tasks, and allocate resources in a way that promotes common goals" (Tackett et al, 2022;p.…”

Subjective losers of globalization

“…The globalization-cleavage account depicted on the left-hand side of Figure 1 suggests that selfcategorized losers and winners of globalization primarily differ in their attitudes on issues associated with globalization, that is, international trade and market integration, European integration, and immigration. Relying on objective socio-economic markers to classify individuals as losers or winners of globalization, previous studies have shown that those with less formal education, as well as production workers, tend to be more globalization-sceptic across these different facets of globalization (e.g., Bovens & Wille, 2017;de Vries, 2018;de Wilde et al, 2019;Kriesi et al, 2008Kriesi et al, , 2012; on the causal nature of this education divide, also see: Kunst et al, 2020;Kunst, 2022). We add to this literature by studying how attitudes vary among self-categorized globalization losers and winners.…”

I Guess We are from Very Different Backgrounds: Attitudes Towards Social Justice and Intergenerational Educational Mobility in European Societies

“…Similarly, some studies have also pointed out the role of educational mobility on perception of social phenomena. For instance, educational attainment is seen as an important predictor for openness towards globalisation, but as Kunst et al (2023) show using European Social Survey data, there is an enduring influence of parental educational level on the respondents' views. Using the same data, Creighton et al (2022) found that upward educational mobility can moderate antipathy towards immigration.…”