Immigration attitudes and the emerging education divide in left-right identification
2026-05-21
Across the advanced democracies, educational attainment has become increasingly linked to citizens’ political orientations. Education, it seems, polarizes citizens – with the higher educated turning to the left and the lower educated to the right. Here, we contend that this ideological divide between the highly and less educated does not stem from changing political opinions, but rather from a change in the issues that are associated with left and right . Drawing on over two decades of data from the European Social Survey, we demonstrate that Europeans have progressively come to associate left-right positions more with views on immigration. As a result, long-standing educational divides in immigration attitudes have become more strongly reflective of left-right self-identifications. Our findings suggest that the growing education-based cleavage is driven not by opinion change, but by the rising salience of immigration in structuring ideological labels.