Education is leading the two sides of politics to change sides

A strange thing is happening in politics. People who in earlier times could have been expected to vote for the right-wing party are now more likely to be supporting the party on the left, while those who would have voted for the left in times past are now more inclined vote for the right.

This is something the insiders – the political scientists, pollsters and party professionals – know all about, but the politicians prefer not to admit. So it’s news to the rest of us.

You could see it alluded to in all the learned explanations of why Donald Trump romped home in the presidential election that was too close to call. But you can also see it in our own elections. Indeed, it’s a “secular” (long-term) trend occurring in the politics of most rich countries.

Did you see some commentator saying the Republicans were now the party of the working class? What! It’s truer than it sounds. Our own Farrah Tomazin wrote that the election saw “the realignment of the Republicans as a party that appeals to the working class while the Democrats have increasingly become the party of college-educated, upper-income suburban voters, especially women”.

A distinguished American professor of anthropology added that “Trump voters trend older, white, rural, religious and less educated”. It seems most “voters of colour” still voted Democrat, but enough Latinos and others defected to Trump to give him an easy win.

And, as I say, you see a similar role reversal going on here in Oz. Professor Ian McAllister of the Australian National University, who oversees its Australian Election Study, a large sample survey of voters following every federal election, says we’ve been gradually moving the same way since the 1990s.

His study, following the federal election in May 2022, found it showed a continuation of “major sociodemographic shifts in voting patterns based on gender, generation and social class, with significant implications for the future of the major parties”.

Historically, the two big parties represented the rival interests of voters playing different roles in the economy. Labor looked after the workers supplying their labour, while the Liberals looked after those small and big businesspeople supplying their capital.

The standard division between the working, middle and upper classes was based on people’s occupational status: blue-collar, white-collar, owners and managers.

But that economy-based division is being replaced by more people voting according to their social values and identity. McAllister says this shift is being driven by rising levels of education. Whether someone has a university education is now the best single predictor of how they vote.

As a general rule, those people with a university degree end up with values and preferences that are quite different from those of people who don’t have a degree, or left school early.

So, just as college-educated Americans are more likely to vote Democrat, Australians with a degree are more likely to vote Labor. People without tertiary education are more likely to vote Republican, Liberal or National Party.

It follows – again as a broad generalisation – that the more highly educated are more likely to live nearer the centre of big cities, where the better-paid jobs tend to be, while the less highly educated are more likely to be found in the outer suburbs and the regions.

Over the 34 years to 2023, the proportion of adults with a university degree has risen from 8 per cent to almost one-third. Each year, more than half of students completing high school go on to uni.

So, as each year passes, people in the oldest generation, who are less likely to be graduates, die, while the youngsters taking their place in the electorate are more likely to be graduates.

In his report on the 2022 federal election, McAllister found that Labor still attracted more working-class votes, although its share of them had fallen to just 38 per cent. The Coalition lost votes from university-educated voters, high-income voters and home owners – groups that, in the previous election, were more likely to have supported it.

A much higher proportion of girls are going on to uni these days, which helps explain why more women vote Labor than for the Coalition. And higher education does much to explain why Labor’s support is much stronger among younger voters.

McAllister has found that, as the Millennials get older – some are now in their early 40s – they’re less likely to drift to the right the way earlier generations did as they aged.

You might see the Liberals’ loss of six heartland seats to the teals as a clear example of the secular trend we’re discussing: Liberal voters who cared about climate change, a federal anti-corruption commission and more women in parliament, switching their vote to the teals.

But McAllister found it was more complicated than that. Only about one-fifth of former Liberal voters changed their vote. What got the teals across the line was strategic voting by those seats’ minority Labor and Greens voters. Knowing their party was never going to win, they threw their weight behind the teals, who did have a chance of winning.

As voters around the rich world become less likely to vote according to their economic class and more likely to vote according to their social and cultural values, political scientists have developed a fancy new theory that characterises parties on the left as GAL and parties on the right as TAN.

GAL stands for green, alternative (relaxed about gender fluidity, for instance) and libertarian (“my body, my choice”). TAN stands for traditional (“I liked it the way it was” and “the world should be run by men”), authoritarian (“we need strong leadership”) and nationalist (“why are they letting in all those strange immigrants?”).

So when, in coming months, you see Peter Dutton banging on about inflation, all those terrible immigrants and all the crime on the streets, and campaigning hard in the outer suburbs and regions, the media will tell you he’s borrowing from the Trump playbook. But now you’ll know there’s a lot more to it.

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Consumerism and social status keep our noses to the grindstone

What better time to think about whether we’re working too hard than while we’re enjoying a Monday off, thanks to a public holiday? Wouldn’t it be nice if every weekend could be a long weekend?

Actually, almost 100 years ago, the greatest economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, pretty much predicted that’s the way we’d be living by now.

In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930, he envisaged that by now, we’d be able to live comfortably while having to work only 15 hours a week. We could work just three hours each weekday, or clock up our 15 hours in just a few days – say, three five-hour days.

Really? What a duffer. How could anyone so smart be so disastrously wrong?

Well, not quite. What Keynes was saying was that, technological advance – the invention of ever-better labour-saving machines – would increase the productivity of our labour to such an extent that, by now, we wouldn’t need to work very hard to be able to live comfortably.

His point was that, as we’re able to produce more goods and services per hour of work, we become better off. We can take that benefit either as enjoying an unchanged material standard of living while working fewer hours a week, or as higher monetary income – thus allowing us to buy more stuff – while working the same number of hours.

As Jan Behringer and other economists from Germany’s University of Duisburg-Essen have written, in the years since Keynes made that prediction the productivity of labour in the developed economies has improved by more than he expected.

So, we could have been working a 15-hour week had we chosen to but, in fact, we chose to take the money and the extra stuff rather than the extra leisure. Working hours have fallen since the 1930s, but not by all that much.

Behringer and colleagues say the “obstacles to more leisure time are primarily sociopolitical in nature” – by which they mean it’s not purely economic reasons, the shortage of resources, that require us to work more.

I’ve no doubt it has suited the rich and powerful to have us working and spending rather than devoting four days a week to developing our hobbies. That way, the rich and powerful get more so.

But, by the same token, I think the rest of us have been easily seduced by the lure of the materialist, consumer culture. We love buying things that are new, shinier and do better tricks.

In Australia – and in Europe, but less so in America – pretty much all the reductions in working hours, the increases in annual leave and sick leave, and the introduction of that strange animal, long service leave, have happened because union-backed governments have imposed them on unwilling employers.

And every time they have, the employers and their political parties have predicted the death and destruction of the economy.

But, even so, how long since you’ve seen a union telling its bosses they should go easy on the pay rise, but cut working hours? No, I have no doubt that the workers have preferred more bangles and baubles.

Behringer and colleagues, however, have a different take. Their study of developments in the US and Europe over the decades leads them to two conclusions.

First, since the 1980s, average working hours have fallen more slowly as inequality – the gap between high and low incomes – has increased.

Second, in countries with high inequality, employees earning higher hourly wage rates tend to work longer hours than those on lower hourly wage rates.

Both these findings are striking because they contradict economists’ earlier finding that people with higher incomes chose to increase their leisure time.

So, what’s going on? The authors’ explanation is that rising inequality of incomes leads to more “upward status comparisons”. Like most social animals, we are conscious of our social status – where we fit in the pecking order.

And, particularly where there’s a big difference between the top and the bottom, we seek to improve our position.

“The upper middle class emulates the consumption norms of the rich, and sacrifices leisure time to do so. Because the rich also increase their spending on status goods such as housing, education, etc as their incomes rise, the middle class feels pressure to keep up,” they say.

“After all, what constitutes ‘a good place to live’ or ‘a good education’ is essentially defined in comparison to the standards that the upper income groups largely determine.”

Another of their findings is that working hours are more likely to be shorter when wage bargaining is centralised and government social benefits in kind (but not in cash) are more adequate.

One possible explanation, they say, is that centralised wage bargaining reduces status conflict because workers can decide collectively to avoid a “positional arms race” to allow shorter working hours and more leisure.

They find that social benefits in kind rather than cash are associated with lower hours of work. This may be because the direct provision of goods and services by governments reduces the need for status-oriented private spending on goods and services.

Education has many dimensions. It broadens the mind, it helps you get a better-paying job, and it’s a “positional good” – it helps people judge your social status.

"The extent to which the education sector is organised through private markets is found to be associated with longer working hours among workers who themselves have high levels of education,” the authors say.

Get it? If governments provided better healthcare and public schools, more people would be content to use the publicly provided services along with everyone else, and fewer people would feel the need to work longer to afford private hospitals and schools.

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