In the United States today, Democrats are the party of elites, while Republicans are with the “common man.” Since Democrats are on most issues the more anti-market party, this makes it seem like elites are more in favor of economic statism.
Yet there is a near universal pattern in the opposite direction, as shown in a new paper by John Nye and his co-authors called “Education and Market Liberal Preferences.” Looking at World Values Survey data over the time period 1990 to 2023, they find that higher education predicts pro-market values in 95% of cases, with 77% of the country-years showing a statistically significant relationship in that direction.
Pro-market values are determined using three World Values Survey questions asking respondents to place themselves on scales concerning a) whether incomes should be made more equal; b) whether private ownership of business and industry should be increased; and c) whether competition is good because it stimulates people to work hard and develop new ideas. The authors combine the three into an index, coding each so that higher scores represent more pro-market views.
Below is the percent change in a pro-market direction associated with having a college degree for various countries across the last few decades.
Compared to most other places, college graduates in the US are not that much more pro-market. But note that even in America the sign is positive in four out of five years.
This is all pretty remarkable considering the state of the universities. And Nye et al. find that being more educated is associated with more pro-market views even among Russians who grew up in the Soviet Union. There is a deep connection between being more friendly to capitalism and being more educated that seems to go beyond what is taught in any particular education system. It is probably related to intelligence and openness.
By just looking at the US and the UK, we get the wrong impression about human nature, since these are unusual cases. That said, even American college graduates were more pro-market than non-college graduates as late as 2017, though just barely. Yet they still voted for Hillary.
This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers to the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.
This post is sponsored by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.
I think Republicans would obviously be well served by trying to be less repulsive to educated voters in ways that would be unambiguously beneficial to them, but your plot with the cities doesn't really help your point as much as you think:
* 5/11 of those are from Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Czechia) where left-wing parties are close to nonexistent electorally and where both mainstream camps are right-wing, one more pro-EU & generally market-friendly and the other more populist and Orban-like. Due to an effect I call "vaccinated against communism," every election in these countries is basically between Mitt Romney and Trump, with even moderate leftists playing a marginal role if any. That is actually kind of cool if you are right-leaning, but I don't think that is likely to happen anytime soon in the US no matter what the GOP does.
* Belgrade is an even worse example because Serbia is basically a country dominated by an Orban-style nationalist uniparty, and the Belgrade mayor is from that party. This is almost like including Moscow.
* In Berlin and Helsinki, the mayor does not actually have a right-wing majority and governs with the left in one way or the other, so it is arguable how much more right-wing substantive policy is compared to a moderate Dem mayor like Matt Mahan or Daniel Lurie.
* That leaves us with only three examples of cities governed by a completely right-wing majority in a country with an actual existing left, same as in the US. Even among these, two of them (Oslo and Valencia) are governed with the mainstream right working together with the chud right. Madrid is actually the only example of a completely chud-free right-leaning municipal government in your European list which can govern without any reliance on the populist right.
Basically urban voters are left leaning in most western countries that don't have a legacy of communism and even even with a separate non-chud center right party it is pretty hard to get a right of center governing majority.
I am not at all convinced by your argument that the reason why college-educated voters have turned to the Left on free-market issues is because of GW Bush and Trump.
There has been a clear and well-documented trend towards the Left among college-educated voters in the USA and the rest of the Western world since the late 1960s.
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014
This started with the coming of age of the Baby Boom generation in the late 1960s and has gradually increased with each generation since.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/conscience-without-god-the-cultural
If memory serves correct, you wrote a column on the topic, so I know that you are aware that the trend goes much further back that this article claims.
EDIT: I found the article. See my reply below.
The reason why this has apparently intensified in the 21st Century is because of generational change. The WW2 generation started dying out in the 1990s and early 2000s, and then the Millenial generation started coming of age a bit later. Plus levels of college education increased significantly with each generation. Together this is a massive generational turn-over within the college-educated voters that explains the trend far better.
For a better explanation:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/explaining-the-long-march-through
And, by the way, the Democratic party did pretty well for themselves appealing to the "Chuds" from 1932-1970. The problem is that Democrats have radically changed their policy stands since then:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/how-the-democrats-have-changed-since
College-educated activists on issue like Vietnam, race, environmentalism, gender and other issues joined the Democratic party and due to the change to new political primaries created by the McGovern-Fraser commission greatly increased their influence on the party. You can see this most clearly with the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972.
Bill Clinton actively ran against this wing of the party in 1992, so it undermines your claim that this all started with GW Bush. GW Bush and Trump are reactions to much deeper and longer ideological trends within the college-educated class.