Project 5.3

Education is an important social divide, shaping political attitudes, identities and who interacts with whom. This PhD project investigates why networks are (increasingly) segregated by education and how this fuels polarization around issues like climate change and migration. Moving beyond traditional explanations, the project introduces avoidance as a new mechanism: do people actively avoid educational out-groups, and does this relate to political polarization? Using a combination of register data, ego network surveys, European Social Survey data and behavioural experiments, it offers an exciting opportunity to develop new theory and cutting-edge empirical research on social cohesion in the context of inequality.

Educational differences have become one of the most consequential social divides in contemporary societies. Education shapes socio-economic status, political attitudes and group identities, and increasingly functions as a boundary around which cultural and political conflict is organized. This project aims to uncover how education-based segregation in personal networks emerges and how it contributes to political polarization, conflicts around issues such as climate change and migration and engagement in societal debates on the public good. Going beyond traditional explanations of segregation based on opportunity structures or similarity attraction, the project introduces avoidance as a theoretically and empirically underexplored mechanism. By combining register data, European comparative survey data and controlled experiments, the project will identify whether educational segregation results from contextual constraints or from deliberate preferences for (or against) contact with certain groups, and whether such segregation is related to socio-economic identities and political polarization. Ultimately, the project will generate new theoretical and empirical insights into how education-based identities and network homogeneity shape societal cohesion and conflict under conditions of inequality.

To address these questions, the project uses a multimethod, multilevel empirical strategy. First, Dutch administrative register data enable us to measure educational homophily in family, neighbourhood, school and workplace settings. By linking these opportunity structures to ego network data, we can identify whether actual networks reflect contextual constraints or preference-based processes. This combination of administrative and survey data provides a rare chance to disentangle structural and volitional mechanisms. We will also use these data to investigate the relation between network composition, socio-economic identities and political opinions on polarized issues such as climate change and migration.

Second, the project incorporates a comparative European dimension. Using the European Social Survey, we examine whether educational homogamy is stronger in NUTS2 regions with higher concentrations of tertiary-educated residents. These regions may be more deeply institutionalized ‘schooled societies’, where education plays a more significant role in interpersonal processes related to status and identity. This analysis links macrolevel institutional contexts to microlevel contact patterns, testing whether stronger educational institutions reinforce educational boundary-making.

Third, experimental designs will measure avoidance behaviour directly. Participants will make choices about whom they want to talk to, collaborate with or advise, based on minimal information about others’ educational backgrounds (among other background information). These controlled interactions make it possible to detect subtle avoidance, asymmetric patterns and decision processes that are difficult to observe in real-world data. Avoidance will be further related to socio-economic identities and political attitudes on polarized issues. While the observational analyses offer high ecological validity, these experiments offer high internal validity. Combined, they enable a comprehensive assessment of how avoidance, opportunity and preference interplay in shaping educational networks and how this relates to socio-economic identities and political attitudes.