May 20, 2004

Contact:
Elaine Justice, 404-727-0643, ejustic@emory.edu
Deb Hammacher, 404-727-0644, dhammac@emory.edu

Education Levels and Ideology May Help Drive Partisanship

Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz has uncovered a trend that may help explain why conservative states and districts are becoming more Republican, while liberal states and districts are becoming more Democratic.

While studying national election survey data from the past 40 years, Abramowitz found that the correlation between liberal/conservative self-identification and subsequent party affiliation is lowest for high school-educated respondents, higher for those with some college and highest among college graduates.

In other words, "Liberal college graduates are more Democratic than liberal high-school graduates, and conservative college graduates are much more Republican than conservative high-school graduates," says Abramowitz, who also found this trend has increased over time, primarily among college graduates. "The trend hasn't played itself out yet. We'll continue to see red states get redder and blue states get bluer."

In the South, this phenomenon is helping to push the realignment of parties as traditional conservative Democrats continue to leave the party for the Republicans, he says.

"An implication of this trend is that as education levels in society rise, ideology and party identification become more consistent. That's not the only thing driving ideology -- another factor is the increasingly ideological polarization of the parties' leaders -- but it helps," he says.

According to Abramowitz's research, among those who are college-educated, party identification is based more on evaluations of a party's ideological and policy stances than on traditional family loyalties. Among high-school-educated people, evaluations of parties' positions are not unimportant, but are less important.

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