The Role of Education in Political Information Processing and Correct Voting: Inequality at the Voting Booth?

It has been well established that the effectiveness and quality of political representation is unequally distributed in Western democracies. Scholars have frequently warned about the rise of ‘diploma democracies’ and a ‘new gilded age’ in which political systems are skewed towards the interests of those with a higher socio-economic status. In this paper, we investigate one possible causal mechanism of this inequality: the greater ability of educated citizens to cast a ‘correct’ vote. If some citizens are not able to accurately identify the party or candidate that best represents their interests, electoral and political participation will not lead to full representation. On the basis of the American National Election Study and original experimental data, we provide evidence that citizens’ level of education has important repercussions for their capacity for correct voting. More educated voters have higher levels of political sophistication, and they are in turn more likely to cast a correct vote. As we find that both political sophistication and information processing capability help us to explain the effect of education on correct voting, we expect that this form of stratification will remain rather persistent.