Periodic Reporting for period 3 - TRANSNATIONAL (The Transnational Divide: Local Triggers, Social Networks, and Group Identities)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2024-01-01 al 2025-06-30
Sintesi del contesto e degli obiettivi generali del progetto
• What is the problem/issue being addressed?
TRANSNATIONAL seeks to explain a surprising and consequential feature of contemporary democratic politics—the intensity of polarization in our societies. One side embraces open societies, cultural diversity, and international governance; the other considers these as a threat to their national community and their way of life. The team describes this as a transnational cleavage which has its roots in an information revolution that started in the 1960s and picked up steam from the 1990s. Over the past half-century, Western societies have seen a great transformation—an information revolution—that has produced a highly educated tertiary sector and that has shifted the organization of production from national markets to a global scale. The consequences for conflict are arguably no less transformative than the rise of the national state or the industrial revolution in centuries past. Education has become the key factor in political mobilization.
The political effects of the information revolution came in two stages. From the 1970s, factories began to give way to offices. Post-industrialization produced a class of public and professional employees who use ‘brain’ rather than ‘brawn’ for a living. The labour force diversified, creating new divisions among the left. Where electoral rules made it easy to set up new political parties, these new employees began to found green parties which raised Green-Alternative-Libertarian (GAL) issues relating to the environment, democratic participation, and lifestyle choice. The first Green parties were set up in Belgium and Germany, high-income democracies with rapidly expanding tertiary sectors and proportional electoral systems.
The second stage began in the 1980s with the globalization of finance and trade, which was made possible because of sharply declining costs of communication and integration of financial and production networks. This technology-driven market process was greatly helped by politics: a slew of international trade agreements reduced national regulatory barriers. The European Union’s single market programme went furthest in perforating national boundaries by making it much easier for people to work in another EU country, creating a common currency, a European health card, and turning nationals into European Union citizens.
The net effect was to diminish the cost of trade and migration. Those with less education have the most to lose as manual jobs shift to cheaper production venues abroad. Similarly, for those who sell their labour, immigration increases competition. For these reasons, the effect of the transnational divide cuts across social class, producing new parties that challenge socialist parties for the allegiance of workers.
These new parties can be referred to as ‘TAN’ in that they stress Traditional values, Authority, and most fervently, the Nation which is imagined as a protective shield against disruptive transnationalism. Pundits tend to call them ‘radical right’ but that is misleading: many have come to champion centrist –not rightwing—economic policies and they often defend the welfare state. Not very rightwing!
In contrast, educated people have the most to gain from a transnational community. They can now travel more cheaply, study or look for work across borders, and buy a wider variety of products at competitive prices. Also, for those who have financial or intellectual capital, immigrants are both a source of cultural richness and of cheap nannies or baristas. And hence the professional classes, who some decades ago became a chief source for GAL parties, now find themselves in pole position to defend transnationalism against TAN parties.
If there is one feature that sets GAL and TAN parties apart it is education. Today in the European Union, about 38% of the voting population is highly educated, that is, they have at least some post-secondary education. Social democratic, Christian democratic, or conservative parties merely reflect the educational make-up of the electorate as a whole. However, the highly educated are hugely over-represented in Green parties: more than 55% are highly educated. This contrasts sharply with just 22% for TAN parties.
Why is education such a powerful marker? Education produces both cultural and economic assets for success in a post-industrial society. Education, particularly of the general non-vocational kind, opens one’s mind to be tolerant and empathic of those who look, speak, or live differently from oneself, and this prepares educated people much better for a multicultural society. At the same time, higher education hones a set of analytical and people’s skills that enable one to transfer more flexibly from one job to another – even hop from country to country.
The team addresses three puzzles related to this contemporary divide. How do voters perceive the divide when they vote? How does education shape a person so that they stand on one side of the divide or the other? Why do women tend to stand on the cosmopolitan side more than men?
• Why is it important for society?
An understanding of the sources of the great divide in contemporary Europe is the first step in understanding the political world in which we live. The 2019 European parliamentary elections are a case in point. They were a wake-up call for Europe. One can sum up the results in three trends. First, ‘the mainstream curtailed’: the two largest party groups, the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) lost their majority. Second, ‘Euroscepticism contained’: nationalists from Matteo Salvini to Victor Orbàn gained, although modestly. Third, ‘Europeanism discovered’: pro-European green and social-liberal parties, skillfully coordinated by Emmanuel Macron, broke through beyond north-western Europe.
At first blush, the elections seem to have produced a more kaleidoscopic, and fractious, parliament – one in which every majority will have to be artfully crafted from the ground up. The new Commission President-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, seemed keenly aware of the new climate and sought to stock her team with representatives of diverse points of view – in the hope, no doubt, of using them as middlemen in coalition building.
At the same time, the elections have brought renewed clarity to the public debate. Finally, one might say, each side understands that the ground has shifted and that a new political cleavage has emerged. We can begin to grasp what divides our societies, what the fundamental choices are, and who stands where and why.
• What are the overall objectives?
The objectives of TRANSNATIONAL are scholarly. The team is developing an empirically grounded theoretical framework for understanding the social bases of the transnational cleavage. We do this in a series of papers that set out a micro-approach to assess how social structure is expressed in polarized political beliefs and behavior. We build precise expectations over the role of education, occupation, and gender at successive phases of the information revolution beginning in the 1960s and accelerating in the decades around the turn of the 21st century.
TRANSNATIONAL seeks to explain a surprising and consequential feature of contemporary democratic politics—the intensity of polarization in our societies. One side embraces open societies, cultural diversity, and international governance; the other considers these as a threat to their national community and their way of life. The team describes this as a transnational cleavage which has its roots in an information revolution that started in the 1960s and picked up steam from the 1990s. Over the past half-century, Western societies have seen a great transformation—an information revolution—that has produced a highly educated tertiary sector and that has shifted the organization of production from national markets to a global scale. The consequences for conflict are arguably no less transformative than the rise of the national state or the industrial revolution in centuries past. Education has become the key factor in political mobilization.
The political effects of the information revolution came in two stages. From the 1970s, factories began to give way to offices. Post-industrialization produced a class of public and professional employees who use ‘brain’ rather than ‘brawn’ for a living. The labour force diversified, creating new divisions among the left. Where electoral rules made it easy to set up new political parties, these new employees began to found green parties which raised Green-Alternative-Libertarian (GAL) issues relating to the environment, democratic participation, and lifestyle choice. The first Green parties were set up in Belgium and Germany, high-income democracies with rapidly expanding tertiary sectors and proportional electoral systems.
The second stage began in the 1980s with the globalization of finance and trade, which was made possible because of sharply declining costs of communication and integration of financial and production networks. This technology-driven market process was greatly helped by politics: a slew of international trade agreements reduced national regulatory barriers. The European Union’s single market programme went furthest in perforating national boundaries by making it much easier for people to work in another EU country, creating a common currency, a European health card, and turning nationals into European Union citizens.
The net effect was to diminish the cost of trade and migration. Those with less education have the most to lose as manual jobs shift to cheaper production venues abroad. Similarly, for those who sell their labour, immigration increases competition. For these reasons, the effect of the transnational divide cuts across social class, producing new parties that challenge socialist parties for the allegiance of workers.
These new parties can be referred to as ‘TAN’ in that they stress Traditional values, Authority, and most fervently, the Nation which is imagined as a protective shield against disruptive transnationalism. Pundits tend to call them ‘radical right’ but that is misleading: many have come to champion centrist –not rightwing—economic policies and they often defend the welfare state. Not very rightwing!
In contrast, educated people have the most to gain from a transnational community. They can now travel more cheaply, study or look for work across borders, and buy a wider variety of products at competitive prices. Also, for those who have financial or intellectual capital, immigrants are both a source of cultural richness and of cheap nannies or baristas. And hence the professional classes, who some decades ago became a chief source for GAL parties, now find themselves in pole position to defend transnationalism against TAN parties.
If there is one feature that sets GAL and TAN parties apart it is education. Today in the European Union, about 38% of the voting population is highly educated, that is, they have at least some post-secondary education. Social democratic, Christian democratic, or conservative parties merely reflect the educational make-up of the electorate as a whole. However, the highly educated are hugely over-represented in Green parties: more than 55% are highly educated. This contrasts sharply with just 22% for TAN parties.
Why is education such a powerful marker? Education produces both cultural and economic assets for success in a post-industrial society. Education, particularly of the general non-vocational kind, opens one’s mind to be tolerant and empathic of those who look, speak, or live differently from oneself, and this prepares educated people much better for a multicultural society. At the same time, higher education hones a set of analytical and people’s skills that enable one to transfer more flexibly from one job to another – even hop from country to country.
The team addresses three puzzles related to this contemporary divide. How do voters perceive the divide when they vote? How does education shape a person so that they stand on one side of the divide or the other? Why do women tend to stand on the cosmopolitan side more than men?
• Why is it important for society?
An understanding of the sources of the great divide in contemporary Europe is the first step in understanding the political world in which we live. The 2019 European parliamentary elections are a case in point. They were a wake-up call for Europe. One can sum up the results in three trends. First, ‘the mainstream curtailed’: the two largest party groups, the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) lost their majority. Second, ‘Euroscepticism contained’: nationalists from Matteo Salvini to Victor Orbàn gained, although modestly. Third, ‘Europeanism discovered’: pro-European green and social-liberal parties, skillfully coordinated by Emmanuel Macron, broke through beyond north-western Europe.
At first blush, the elections seem to have produced a more kaleidoscopic, and fractious, parliament – one in which every majority will have to be artfully crafted from the ground up. The new Commission President-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, seemed keenly aware of the new climate and sought to stock her team with representatives of diverse points of view – in the hope, no doubt, of using them as middlemen in coalition building.
At the same time, the elections have brought renewed clarity to the public debate. Finally, one might say, each side understands that the ground has shifted and that a new political cleavage has emerged. We can begin to grasp what divides our societies, what the fundamental choices are, and who stands where and why.
• What are the overall objectives?
The objectives of TRANSNATIONAL are scholarly. The team is developing an empirically grounded theoretical framework for understanding the social bases of the transnational cleavage. We do this in a series of papers that set out a micro-approach to assess how social structure is expressed in polarized political beliefs and behavior. We build precise expectations over the role of education, occupation, and gender at successive phases of the information revolution beginning in the 1960s and accelerating in the decades around the turn of the 21st century.
Lavoro eseguito dall’inizio del progetto fino alla fine del periodo coperto dalla relazione e principali risultati finora ottenuti
The project has made major progress on the objectives of TRANSNATIONAL. Let’s begin with the results on education, which is the giant in the room in explaining much of political behavior and attitudes, including those related to polarization on the transnational divide. The initial work accepted the conventional wisdom that the key factor was how long a person spent in education, and particularly whether they had only secondary education or had post-secondary education. Just about every paper published on the vast topic of political attitudes and behavior has to take education into account, either as a key explanatory variable, or as a control variable. Yet the extent to which a person is educated, which is the predominant way in which education is conceptualized in public opinion surveys, is just one way in which education may affect political beliefs and behavior. In our research we have found that the substantive field of education has an independent, and important, role to play over and above level of education. To our own surprise, we find that a person's field of education -- whether, for example, they are educated in engineering or social science -- has an even stronger effect than the number of years they have studied.
A second line of research concerns how voters perceive competition among political parties. Here the team take a voter-perspective to evaluate how party competition has been restructured in the eyes of the voter, and we find that a GAL/TAN dimension explains citizens’ self-reported probabilities to vote for alternative political parties. The results provide evidence of a substantial shift in voter assessment from party competition structured along the economic left–right dimension to competition structured along the GAL-TAN dimension. We also find great separation of TAN parties from other parties, with the deepest antipathy between the TAN parties and greens.
A third line of research came about in response to COVID. How, has the pandemic affected peoples’ boundaries of solidarity. On the basis of panel surveys, the team find that personal experience with the crisis makes a big difference. Individuals who suffered income loss due to the pandemic tend to discriminate more against people they consider outsiders, while those who suffered a health shock, either personally or in their close family, tend to be more inclusive and more generous in the way they consider one of “us”.
A second line of research concerns how voters perceive competition among political parties. Here the team take a voter-perspective to evaluate how party competition has been restructured in the eyes of the voter, and we find that a GAL/TAN dimension explains citizens’ self-reported probabilities to vote for alternative political parties. The results provide evidence of a substantial shift in voter assessment from party competition structured along the economic left–right dimension to competition structured along the GAL-TAN dimension. We also find great separation of TAN parties from other parties, with the deepest antipathy between the TAN parties and greens.
A third line of research came about in response to COVID. How, has the pandemic affected peoples’ boundaries of solidarity. On the basis of panel surveys, the team find that personal experience with the crisis makes a big difference. Individuals who suffered income loss due to the pandemic tend to discriminate more against people they consider outsiders, while those who suffered a health shock, either personally or in their close family, tend to be more inclusive and more generous in the way they consider one of “us”.
Progressi oltre lo stato dell’arte e potenziale impatto previsto (incluso l’impatto socioeconomico e le implicazioni sociali più ampie del progetto fino ad ora)
Each of these projects goes beyond the state of the art, and each provides us with results that were to some extent unexpected.
FIELD OF EDUCATION. Our finding that a person’s field of education is so powerful in predicting their vote choice is perhaps the most telling result of our research so far. It really is a wake up call for researchers who study voting and political attitudes, and suggests new lines of research that we cannot yet predict. But does the field that person studies shape their political views, or do people tend to study fields because they have particular views of the world? This is a vital unanswered question that we intend to pursue.
Fields of education vary widely in their substantive content, their social networks, their psychological associations, and they arguably stand as a proxy for social characteristics that reach back into childhood and early adulthood. So far we find evidence for self-selection prior to the post-secondary educational experience, but we also find that the effect of a person’s field of education continues over their life course, both during education and in their occupation. Our research suggests that individuals self-select into socialization: pre-education experiences shape political attitudes and the choice of study, which then influences where people work.
GENDER. How does gender fit into this? The information revolution has undermined traditional gender stereotypes. It has shaken the patriarchal presumption of privilege in the workplace, in the family, and in the wider society. It has offered women the prospect of social, economic and political equality while magnifying the distance between the ideal and the reality. Women in knowledge-intensive occupations were decisive in the rise of Green political parties. Men in occupations vulnerable to the economic and cultural consequences of the information revolution are the core of TAN political parties. We know that woman are over-represented in arts and humanities fields which lean Green, while men are over-represented in engineering fields which lean TAN. What is going on here, and how can we explain it? To what extent does field of education mediate the gendered voting that we witness in election after election?
One of the great strengths of an advanced ERC is that it makes space for researchers to find puzzles in the course of their research. The puzzles that have framed TRANSNATIONAL were not prebaked, but arose out of our ongoing research. We hope that we can continue to generate unexpected findings in the final period of the project.
FIELD OF EDUCATION. Our finding that a person’s field of education is so powerful in predicting their vote choice is perhaps the most telling result of our research so far. It really is a wake up call for researchers who study voting and political attitudes, and suggests new lines of research that we cannot yet predict. But does the field that person studies shape their political views, or do people tend to study fields because they have particular views of the world? This is a vital unanswered question that we intend to pursue.
Fields of education vary widely in their substantive content, their social networks, their psychological associations, and they arguably stand as a proxy for social characteristics that reach back into childhood and early adulthood. So far we find evidence for self-selection prior to the post-secondary educational experience, but we also find that the effect of a person’s field of education continues over their life course, both during education and in their occupation. Our research suggests that individuals self-select into socialization: pre-education experiences shape political attitudes and the choice of study, which then influences where people work.
GENDER. How does gender fit into this? The information revolution has undermined traditional gender stereotypes. It has shaken the patriarchal presumption of privilege in the workplace, in the family, and in the wider society. It has offered women the prospect of social, economic and political equality while magnifying the distance between the ideal and the reality. Women in knowledge-intensive occupations were decisive in the rise of Green political parties. Men in occupations vulnerable to the economic and cultural consequences of the information revolution are the core of TAN political parties. We know that woman are over-represented in arts and humanities fields which lean Green, while men are over-represented in engineering fields which lean TAN. What is going on here, and how can we explain it? To what extent does field of education mediate the gendered voting that we witness in election after election?
One of the great strengths of an advanced ERC is that it makes space for researchers to find puzzles in the course of their research. The puzzles that have framed TRANSNATIONAL were not prebaked, but arose out of our ongoing research. We hope that we can continue to generate unexpected findings in the final period of the project.