Research into the causal impact of formal education on political beliefs and ultimate voting behavior arrives at contradictory results. While some early work, e.g. Dee (2004) finds education induces more socially-liberal views, more recent works suggests that education makes individuals more fiscally conservative. We use quasi-experimental variation in schooling created by compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) to reconcile these results. Following Marshall (2019), we first examine a pooled sample of voter and find that policy-induced increases in education lead to voters being more likely to identify as, and vote for, Republican candidates, largely due to concerns regarding taxes. Delving further into this result, however, we find highly heterogeneous impacts of education, which depend on the efficacy of CSLs. In particular, in states where CSLs significantly increased educational attainment, impacted individuals become more fiscally conservative, but also exhibit greater support for traditional Democratic social issues like abortion rights and environmental protection, creating so-called “Rockefeller” Republicans. By contrast, voters educated in states where CSLs have no measured impact on educational attainment exhibit generally more conservative attitudes toward non-economics and social issues, which are traits that are consistent with so-called “Goldwater” Republicans.

关于正规教育对政治信仰和最终投票行为的因果影响的研究得出了相互矛盾的结果。虽然一些早期的研究，例如 Dee (2004) 发现教育会引发更多的社会自由主义观点，但最近的研究表明，教育使个人在财政上更加保守。我们使用义务教育法（CSL）创建的学校教育准实验变量来协调这些结果。继 Marshall（2019）之后，我们首先检查了选民的汇总样本，发现政策引发的教育增加导致选民更有可能认同共和党候选人并投票给共和党候选人，这主要是由于对以下问题的担忧：税。然而，进一步深入研究这一结果，我们发现教育的影响高度异质，这取决于 CSL 的有效性。特别是，在 CSL 显着提高教育程度的州，受影响的个人在财政上变得更加保守，但也表现出对堕胎权和环境保护等传统民主党社会问题的更大支持，从而产生了所谓的“洛克菲勒”共和党人。相比之下，在 CSL 对教育程度没有可衡量影响的州接受教育的选民普遍对非经济和社会问题表现出更为保守的态度，这些特征与所谓的“金水”共和党人一致。