The link between education and liberal attitudes is among the most consistent findings in public-opinion research, but the theoretical explanations for this relationship warrant additional attention. Previous work suggested that the relationship is due to education socializing students to the “official culture” of the United States. This study uses the World Values Survey and General Social Survey to examine Americans’ attitudes toward the justifiability of violence. I find that Americans with more education are less likely to say that interpersonal violence—against women, children, and other individuals—can be justifiable. However, they are more likely to say that state-sanctioned violence—war and police violence—can be justifiable. These patterns are consistent with a modified socialization model of education and social attitudes. I conclude that American education socializes people to establishment culture, identity, and interests, which differentiate between unacceptable interpersonal violence and ostensibly acceptable state-sanctioned violence.

The fact that two senators are elected from each state offers the potential for natural paired comparisons. In particular, examining historical and geographic patterns in terms of changes in the number of divided US Senate delegations (i.e., states whose two senators are of different parties) is a useful route to testing competing models of American politics, including theories of split-ticket voting, party polarization, and realignment. Brunell and Grofman (1998) used divided Senate delegations to indirectly examine evidence for realignment. We hypothesized that a partisan realignment will necessarily lead to a cyclical pattern in the number of divided Senate delegations. We predicted that the number of divided Senate delegations at the state level would decline after 1996 because we conjectured that there had been a realignment cusp around 1980. We tested this prediction with data from 1952–2016 and our prediction was confirmed.

In 2004, Jennifer L. Hochschild challenged political scientists to give greater attention to education policy and politics. Although it challenges Hochschild’s interpretation of the politics of school vouchers, this article demonstrates her central assertion that the era of school desegregation continues to impact American politics. Internal campaign strategy documents from presidential election campaigns reveal how the two parties have arrived at different school voucher positions because of the different challenges each party faced as a result of the battle over school desegregation. Republican strategists were concerned that white voters believed their candidates did not care about people of color. Supporting vouchers for urban Black children allowed Republicans to reassure white voters of their racial sensitivity. In contrast, Democratic candidates were more concerned that they might alienate white voters by taking another position that seemed to pander to Black voters. Strategists’ perceptions of white voters’ attitudes toward education and race comprise the thread that connects the past to the present.

Popular accounts of the 2016 presidential election attribute Donald Trump’s victory to the mobilization of angry white men seeking to restore traditional values and social roles. Whereas a majority of Trump voters were male, more than 40% of women who went to the polls on Election Day also supported him. This analysis explores the motivations of these women, asking how partisanship, demographics, and beliefs motivated their vote choice. We found that, although party affiliation was an important predictor of both women’s and men’s vote choice, sexism and racial resentment had a greater influence on voters of both genders. Moreover, the influence of these biases was similar for women and men.