Education and Voter Response to Principled Trade-Offs in Muslim Democracies

Abstract

We contribute to the policy trade-offs literature by focusing on a principled trade-off that juxtaposes a widely desired objective with a moral belief and by examining how education conditions voters’ responses to this trade-off. Through survey experiments in Indonesia and Tunisia, we examine how voters respond to a liberal initiative to relax alcohol restrictions to raise revenue for social security and a conservative initiative to tighten alcohol restrictions even if it decreases social security revenue. We find that voters opposed the liberal initiative and that more educated voters supported the conservative initiative more than their less educated counterparts. These findings highlight the powerful constraints of moral beliefs even in the context of a trade-off with a common good and support the socialization perspective of education that portrays education as an institution that socializes individuals in the society’s dominant values—whether liberal or conservative—as opposed to simply a force for liberalization.