As the twig is bent, the tree is inclined? : the role of parental versus own education for openness towards globalisation

Published online: 22 November 2022Citizens with higher levels of education are consistently found to be more open to immigration and European integration than those with less education. However, the literature has neglected the issue of whether educational divides in anti-globalisation sentiment result from people’s own educational attainment or whether they are a consequence of deep-rooted positions of disadvantage across generations. In this article, we address the question to what extent the attitudes towards globalisation of intergenerationally mobile citizens, that is, those who obtain a different educational outcome than one’s parents, adapt to the newly acquired social position or remain attached to the parental milieu. We apply diagonal reference models to study the influence of one’s own and parental education level on attitudes to globalisation in 26 European countries using the European Social Survey between 2008 and 2018. Our results indicate that while mobile citizens adjust their attitudes to the achieved education level, there remains an enduring influence of the education level of origin. In addition, we find that the importance of parental educational attainment does not depend on the social fluidity between education levels within countries. Consequently, this study has important implications for studying political socialisation and the future of the educational divide over globalisation