Educating for Democracy? Going to College Increases Political Participation

TY - JOUR

T1 - Educating for Democracy? Going to College Increases Political Participation

AU - Jensen, Andreas Videbæk

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s), 2025.

PY - 2025/2

Y1 - 2025/2

N2 - It is a long-standing view that educational institutions sustain democracy by building an engaged citizenry. However, recent scholarship has seriously questioned whether going to college increases political participation. While these studies have been ingenious in using natural experiments to credibly estimate the causal effect of college, most have produced estimates with high statistical uncertainty. I contend that college matters: I argue that, together, prior effect estimates are just as compatible with a positive effect as a null effect. Furthermore, analyzing two-panel datasets of young US voters, using a well-powered difference-in-differences design, I find that attending college leads to a substantive increase in voter turnout. Importantly, these findings are consistent with the statistically uncertain but positive estimates in previous studies. This calls for updating our view of the education-participation relationship, suggesting that statistical uncertainty in prior studies may have concealed that college education has substantive civic returns.

AB - It is a long-standing view that educational institutions sustain democracy by building an engaged citizenry. However, recent scholarship has seriously questioned whether going to college increases political participation. While these studies have been ingenious in using natural experiments to credibly estimate the causal effect of college, most have produced estimates with high statistical uncertainty. I contend that college matters: I argue that, together, prior effect estimates are just as compatible with a positive effect as a null effect. Furthermore, analyzing two-panel datasets of young US voters, using a well-powered difference-in-differences design, I find that attending college leads to a substantive increase in voter turnout. Importantly, these findings are consistent with the statistically uncertain but positive estimates in previous studies. This calls for updating our view of the education-participation relationship, suggesting that statistical uncertainty in prior studies may have concealed that college education has substantive civic returns.

KW - college

KW - education

KW - political participation

KW - statistical power

KW - voter turnout

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85219009380&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1017/S0007123424000486

DO - 10.1017/S0007123424000486

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85219009380

SN - 0007-1234

VL - 55

JO - British Journal of Political Science

JF - British Journal of Political Science

M1 - e1

ER -