Does the Field of Study Influence Students' Political Attitudes?Mira Fischer, Björn Kauder, Niklas Potrafke and Heinrich Ursprung No 5545, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Abstract: We investigate whether the field of study influences university students’ political attitudes. To disentangle self-selection from learning effects, we first investigate whether the fields of study chosen by the incoming students correlate with their political attitudes. In a second step we explore how the political attitudes change as the students progress in their studies. Our results are based on a German pseudo-panel survey, the sample size of which exceeds that of comparable student surveys by an order of magnitude. We find systematic differences between the students’ political attitudes across eight fields of study. These differences can in most cases be attributed to self-selection. A notable exception is economics. Even though self-selection is also important, training in economics has an unambiguous influence on the political attitudes: by the time of graduation, economics students are about 6.2 percentage points more likely than they were as freshmen to agree with liberal-democratic policy positions. Keywords: indoctrination; nature versus nurture; field of study; polical socialization; political attitudes; economics (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_5545 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC. |
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