“Does College Education Make People Politically Liberal?: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in South Korea”, 2019-07 ():
Our study examines the impact of college education on individuals’ ideological orientations (identifying as politically liberal or conservative) using a massive expansion of opportunities to attend college known as the graduation quota program in South Korea.
A 1979 military coup in South Korea mandated that all public and private colleges expand their college admission quotas by 30% in 1981 and 50% in 1982. As an ideal natural experiment for our study, the mandatory increases in college enrollment happened quickly and exogenously in a short timeframe.
We use the birth cohorts that were exposed to this abrupt policy change as an instrumental variable (IV) to identify the long-term effects of college education on political preferences. We find that the enrollment expansion caused those individuals who were induced to attend college by the graduation quota program to be more politically liberal.
[Keywords: college education, political ideology, ideological orientations, natural experiment, graduation quota program]
…On October 26, 1979, the Korean CIA director Jae-gyu Kim assassinated president Chung-hee Park who became a dictator by changing the constitution in 1972 and allowing himself to control all the political power in South Korea. Taking advantage of the political turmoil after the assassination, General Doo-hwan Chun successfully took political power through a military coup in 1979 and launched the Special Committee for National Security on December 12, 1979, which was a super-constitutional legislative body. As part of socio-economic reform, the graduate quote program was announced by this committee on July 30th, 1980, which was intended to expand the opportunity of higher education to the public and to improve the quality of higher education. Through this program, General Chun’s regime forced all colleges to admit more students, 130% of each school’s present admission level in March 1981 (the first month of the 1981 academic year in South Korea). This expansion was increased up to 150% in 1982 and afterwards. Universities followed the order by lowering the admission scores to allow more students to be admitted. The Chun’s regime also required tougher graduation guidelines of those admitted students to encourage the academic efforts of college students. In other words, the Chun’s regime designed the program to admit more students but to let fewer students graduate by removing students who had poor college grade point averages (GPA). Contrary to the initial plan, the program admitted more students but failed to drop students with poor academic outcomes because universities, students and their parents were consistently against it (Kang 1986). As a result, more people completed college education through this program.
…Results…Table 6 reports the OLS and IV results for the two ideology measures in the first to 4th columns with control variables. Control variables are individuals’ age and gender as well as the educational attainment of individuals’ father and mother, as shown in Table 1: The OLS estimates with control variables in the first and third columns indicates that college education leads to about a 0.056 increase in the ideological scale and a 4.3 percentage point rise in the probability of being ideologically liberal, which are non-statistically-significant. The IV estimates in the second and 4th columns indicates much larger increases than the OLS estimates, a 1.472 in the ideological scale and a 71.3 percentage point in the probability of being ideologically liberal.
…With the assumption that college education may affect individuals differently in shaping ideological orientations, our IV estimate should be considered to be the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) estimate. Thus, our IV estimate implies that having some college education or more increases the individuals’ political ideology scale by 1.472 (on a 1–5 Likert scale) and the probability of being ideologically liberal by 71.3 percentage points, for those who were induced to go to college due to the graduation quota program.