Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

The Politics of the Latent Educational Cleavage

Project description

How education structures politics

Over the past 200 years, significant educational expansion and the transition to post-industrial societies have reshaped economies and politics, creating an educational cleavage that influences political dynamics. Despite its importance, research on this topic remains fragmented. The ERC-funded POLEDUC project aims to develop a unified theoretical framework and innovative empirical analyses by integrating quantitative, qualitative, and experimental methods. At the micro level, it will conduct public opinion surveys to examine the educational divide among the general population and higher education students. At the meso level, it will analyse party politics related to this divide, while at the macro level, it will investigate why policymakers are increasingly responsive to more educated citizens.

Objective

One of the most important changes of the last 200 years is the massive educational expansion and the related shift from industrial to post-industrial societies in countries around the globe. This educational revolution has reshaped our societies and economies. But it also transformed politics: Nowadays, education affects almost every aspect of politics. A new systematic conflict line has emerged: the educational cleavage. Its emergence has not gone unnoticed. But existing research remains scattered across disciplines and subfields and has not developed into a comprehensive research agenda yet.

POLEDUC offers a comprehensive research agenda on the POlitics of the Latent EDUcational Cleavage across countries, over time, and across three analytical levels: the micro-level of individuals’ attitudes, perceptions, identities, and behavior; the meso-level of organized political actors; and the macro-level of (unequal) representation in the politics of policy-making. POLEDUC develops a unified multi-dimensional theoretical framework and offers novel, ground-breaking empirical analyses, combining quantitative, qualitative, and experimental state-of-the-art methods.

On the micro-level, POLEDUC uses existing and conducts new public opinion surveys to study the educational cleavage across countries and over time, surveying the general population and higher education students in particular. On the meso-level, we analyze the party politics of the educational cleavage using qualitative and machine learning tools plus an expert survey. On the macro-level we explore whether and why policy-makers are increasingly responsive to more educated citizens, using comparative case studies.

Overall, POLEDUC studies a phenomenon of utmost social and scientific relevance. It breaks new theoretical and empirical ground on a core cleavage of contemporary politics, uncovering a defining feature of modern democracy and contributing novel insights to several fields and disciplines.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG

See all projects funded under this call

Host institution

JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE-UNIVERSITAET FRANKFURT AM MAIN
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 999 966,00
Address
THEODOR W ADORNO PLATZ 1
60323 FRANKFURT AM MAIN
Germany

See on map

Region
Hessen Darmstadt Frankfurt am Main, Kreisfreie Stadt
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 999 966,00

Beneficiaries (1)

My booklet 0 0