More education, less prejudice against sexual minorities? Evidence from compulsory schooling reforms

ABSTRACT

Utilizing exogenous variation in educational attainment induced by compulsory schooling reforms in 15 European countries, this study estimates the causal effect of education on individuals’ attitudes towards sexual minorities with a regression discontinuity design. Using data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, this study finds more education reduces individuals’ prejudice against sexual minorities. The findings imply minimum schooling policies can help to build a culture that is more tolerant of sexual minorities, which is beneficial to the minorities’ wellbeing and social cohesion.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrimination
• sexual minorities
• education
• LGBTQ

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I26
• I28
• J15

Acknowledgment

I thank the editor and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The list includes drug addicts, people of different race, people who have AIDS, immigrants, homosexuals, people of a different religion, etc.

² The results are available upon request.

³ The data sets can be downloaded freely after registration from the website: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWVL.jsp.

⁴ The data sets can be downloaded freely after registration from the website: https://search.gesis.org/research_data/ZA4804.

⁵ When men and women are pooled together, the optimal bandwidths for the years of schooling and attitudes towards homosexuals are 13 and 11, respectively. I choose the smaller one, 11, as the common bandwidth.

⁶ The results are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [Grant No. x2jmC2181160].