Polarization in Europe: Radical Right-Wing Populism and the Magnitude of the Educational Divide over Immigration?

Worries about polarization are on the rise. In today’s Europe, one of the most manifest divides is the educational divide over immigration. Where lower educated citizens tend to be nationalists who hold negative attitudes toward immigration, higher educated citizens are generally cosmopolitans with positive ideas about this issue. What fuels this type of intergroup polarization? Based on an analysis of individual-level data coming from the European Social Survey (ESS, 2002-2016), and aggregate-level information about the performance of the economy, immigration, the political system, the state of the immigration debate, and the electoral success of radical right-wing populists, I assess how we can explain educational polarization. Preliminary analyses indicate that educational polarization coincides with high social welfare expenditure, high levels of immigration and more disproportional political systems. Polarization is not related, however, to other economic or political indicators, the success of populist radical right-wing parties, the salience of the immigration issue, or to polarization over this issue among political parties.