19 Aug 2025
A new study uncovers age-specific and cohort-specific polarization – and helps explain contradictory findings on how education affects people’s attitudes.
How strongly does education affect our attitude toward immigration? And does this influence change as people grow older and across generations? A new study by Dr. Fabian Kratz, research associate at LMU’s Chair of Quantitative Inequality Research, shows that polarization processes do not only unfold across generations, but that they also intensify with age. As a result, polarization between birth cohorts may mask age-related polarization.
The analysis is based on 22 waves of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which includes repeat surveys of individuals with different birth years. It shows that education-related differences in concerns about immigration are on the rise: “The data show that people with a higher level of education express less concerns in relation to immigration,” Kratz says. “But the differences between educational groups increase as people grow older and are more pronounced among younger generations than among older generations.”
The study’s concepts of age polarization and cohort polarization provide a new explanation for why growing political polarization is frequently referred to in public debate even though empirical studies often offer no confirmation – a phenomenon known as the “polarization paradox”. “Polarization remains hidden if you only look at a single time dimension,” Kratz explains. “Only when you combine age and cohort effects do you see the complete picture.” To avoid distorting the results, the study draws on modern panel analyses and machine learning-based weightings.
The results help to explain contradictory findings regarding how education affects attitudes. “The effects of education on political attitudes are not cast in stone,” Kratz insists. “They are amplified as people grow older, and they change across generations. We thus find that we can indeed reconcile what appear to be contradictory research findings.” The study identifies new ways in which polarization can be better measured and better understood – all of which is of relevance to research into education, integration and democracy.
Fabian Kratz: Rising Educational Divides in Attitudes: How Polarization Across Cohorts Can Mask Age-Related-Polarization. In: Sociological Science 2025 DOI: 10.15195/vX.aY