Does educational attainment matter for attitudes toward immigrants in Chile? Assessing the causality and generalizability of higher education's so-called “liberalizing effect” on economic and cultural threat

Abstract

Despite a large literature consistently showing a relationship between higher levels of education and lower levels of ethnic prejudice, some points of contention remain. First, it remains unclear whether education has a causal effect on attitudes, mainly due to a lack of longitudinal studies. Second, due to the majority of studies on prejudice being conducted in Europe and North America, we do not know to what extent the inverse relationship between education and prejudice is generalizable beyond the “global North.” To answer these questions, I study attitudes toward immigrants in Chile in the years 2016–2022, using six waves of the Chilean Longitudinal Social Survey. Chile provides new variations in economic and cultural factors, with its stable albeit highly unequal economy, and increased immigration from culturally similar countries which shed light on possible scope conditions of the so-called liberalizing effect of education. I analyze whether attaining more education has an effect on reducing levels of perceived economic and cultural threat. The findings show that increases in education are associated with both lower levels of perceived economic and cultural threat, with education having a stronger effect on the latter.