How Politicians Downplay Lower-Educated Citizens' Opinions

An important challenge facing political decision making today is inequality in representation. Political scientists have shown that the preferences of certain groups—especially those who have higher incomes or are better educated—systematically preponderate in political decision making. Trying to elucidate the mechanisms behind these findings, this research note explores one specific possible driver of representational inequality: that politicians downplay the opinions of disadvantaged groups, and here specifically, of the lower-educated. By means of a survey experiment with politicians, we test the idea that politicians have a hard-wired inclination to assume that the opinions of citizens who have received lower (i.e., vocational) education are less thoughtful than the opinions of citizens who followed a higher (i.e., general) education. The findings are somewhat ambiguous but the expectation is at least partly corroborated by the evidence. The findings illustrate the psychological foundations that may ultimately make politicians disregard the preferences of the lower-educated.