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Learning to be conservative: How high school education increases support for the Republican party∗

Despite education’s capacity to significantly alter students’ life trajectories, little is known about how education affects the political party an individual identifies with and votes for later in life. Using a difference-in-differences design to exploit variation in state compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) across cohorts in the U.S., I find that raising the minimum school leaving age by a year causes a 1-3 percentage point increase in support for the Republican party per cohort. Instrumental variable estimates show that each additional grade of late high school increases the probability that a CSL-complier identifies as or votes Republican by around 10 percentage points. Analysis of the mechanisms suggests that high school’s conservative effects primarily operate by increasing income, which in turn increases support for conservative economic policies and ultimately the Republican party. These results suggest both that recent Democrat attempts to raise state leaving ages, and Republican opposition to CSLs, may be strategically misguided.