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MERITOCRACY IN THE NEWS
@David_Goodhart and Michael Sandel have both written provocative new books about the trouble with 'meritocracy'. Both argue that non-graduates have been undervalued and that graduates in non-graduate jobs are disillusioned. What do the data show? 
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The former question is a tough one since there are two issues at stake. 1. Are non-grads elected as politicians? And 2. Are their policy preferences represented? But consensus in polisci is the answers are (a) Not as much as they used to be and (b) Not as much as for the rich.2/n
In terms of elected representation I strongly recommend reading @DrTomD_OG's CPS article on the decline of working class members in the UK parliament ( https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0010414018784065) or various pieces by @NoamLupu and @Nick_Carnes_ 3/n
On substantive representation there's a huge literature but the basic debate is between Marty Gilens / Larry Bartels who see the rich as over-favored by policy and @madselk and Torben Iversen who see this outcome as reflecting more affluent groups having better information. 4/n
I can't add a great deal to the question about non-graduates. But what @jrgingrich and I can do is talk about what happens to university graduates who don't end up in graduate jobs. We call these 'mismatched' graduates. And, well, Goodhart and Sandel have a point 5/n
How do we know if someone is mismatched? This turns out to be quite hard. The problem is that jobs that didn't need a degree 30 years ago often do now. But is that just credentialism or has the nature of the job changed? Or both? 6/n
The way we do this is to use the ECHP-EU-SILC household surveys for Europe and come up with 'job' categories: a combination of being in a particular occupation in a particular sector. And for each of these jobs we can look across Europe and see how many people are graduates. 7/n
With that in hand we know the graduate % for each job. We call somebody 'mismatched' if they are in a job where fewer than 60% of workers in that job are graduates. That's kind of arbitrary but we think a decent ballpark. Here's what the average looked like 1993-2012 8/n
Along the horizontal axis we have percentage of workers with a degree and along the vertical access we have the proportion of graduates who are mismatched or unemployed. Look at the UK...Not ideal. The Nordics on the other hand have low mismatch and high graduation rates 9/n
So mismatch is bad right? Well maybe, maybe not. The grad wage premium was still high. The problem is that mismatched graduates saw less of this. The graduate wage premium in 2012 was about 60% (and had grown by 15%) but mismatched grads got 20% less than other grads. 10/n
One way to look at this is that the growth in the grad wage premium was going to non-mismatched grads. For the mismatched in the worst-case scenarios - Finland, Spain, France, Italy - they made a third to half less than non-mismatched grads. The UK looks OK by contrast! 11/n
So the story, per Goodhart & Sandel, is that graduates are becoming more diverse in their economic outcomes. They argue that this drives disillusionment with politics. Does it? In recent work @jrgingrich and I code people in the European Social Survey as mis / matched to see 12/n
We look at whether mismatched graduates are less happy than matched graduates in general, less happy with democracy, less trusting of government, and more likely to support the radical right. 13/n
Let's begin with life satisfaction (0 to 10). These are results from a regression with 3 categories - nongrads, mismatched grads, and matched grads. We d see the Goodhart/Sandel hypothesis - mismatched grads look more like nongrads. Note that the size of the effect is small. 14/n
Is this lower life satisfaction turning the mismatched away from democracy? Not really. Here they look much more like matched graduates. So I wouldn't write obituaries for democracy just yet. With that said there are political relationships in the data... 15/n
Let's begin with trust in government. Here we see a (statistically significant) lower level of trust in government among the mismatched vis-a-vis the matched. Mind you, you know who really doesn't trust government - nongraduates! 16/n
And there is some evidence that lower trust and life satisfaction is making voting for radical right parties more attractive for mismatched graduates. It's not huge though - one percent point more likely than other grads. And again the real action is with non-grads. 17/n
Summing up, what have we learned. Well, there are a LOT of mismatched graduates in Europe (perhaps around 50% of grads). And they earn less for the most part than matched grads, though still more than non-graduates. And they occupy a middle category in terms of attitudes 18/n
Grads in non-grad jobs are less happy, less trustful in govt and more likely to vote RR than grads in grad jobs. But they are still closer to graduates than non-graduates on the whole (except for life satisfaction). 19/n
I think there's a temptation among scholars to dismiss the arguments of Goodhart/Sandel because they threaten our understanding of & self interest in the knowledge economy. But mismatched graduates really are different! And mass HE may have casualties even if better overall 20/n
If we want to understand the political turmoil in Europe and the US it's time to take differences AMONG university graduates seriously and not shoot the messenger. Papers with @jrgingrich available at https://tinyurl.com/y5lcbbvl and https://tinyurl.com/y2kaq24g & another forthcoming 21/n
