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

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  • Matt Dickson
  • Kalyan Kumar Kameshwara

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.

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  • Matt Dickson & Kalyan Kumar Kameshwara, 2025. "The causal effect of education on political preferences: Evidence from the UK’s higher education expansion," Discussion Papers 2025-07, Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP).
    • Handle: RePEc:not:notnic:2025-07
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