I have never assumed that being educated makes you safe from the politics going on around you. Most people assume it does. We know that people who stay on at school and go to university are, on average, more welcoming to immigrants. The bit we rarely check is the extra claim hiding inside that one: that educated people also hold steady when the mood of the country turns ugly. I wanted to know whether that is true and what happens in the places where it is not. So I looked at 127,675 people in 26 European countries, interviewed between 2016 and 2024 in the European Social Survey. I matched each person to how well populist parties — those claiming to speak for ordinary people against the elite — had done at the last election, and to what was happening to their newspapers, television and social media at the time. Then I asked one question. Does an education protect your values, or does it just make you better at picking up whatever message is in the air?
The reassuring part first. Where populist parties were doing well, people became less welcoming to immigrants — but they shifted at the same speed whether they had degrees or had left school at sixteen. Education gave people a head start. It did not give them armour. Everyone moved together. I should admit something here. When I first ran the numbers, I got the opposite answer: it looked as though graduates were the ones most easily swayed. That result was wrong, and the reason is worth knowing. I was treating 127,000 people as 127,000 separate pieces of evidence when the real comparison was between a few dozen countries at a few dozen moments. It is like asking thirty children in one classroom and claiming you have surveyed thirty schools. Fix that, and the finding vanishes. I show the same trap springing twice more in the paper. Plenty of published research walks straight into it. That matters beyond my subject: a lot of what we are told about who changes their mind and why quietly rests on the same mistake.
Now the exception, which is the heart of the paper. In countries where populists did not just shout from the sidelines but actually ran the country while weakening the courts and the checks on their power — Hungary, Poland and, for a while, Slovenia — something different happened. As those parties grew stronger, the gap between the educated and everyone else closed. In the strongest cases it shrank by more than half. Hungary carries much of that weight, and I say so. Why? Because the government was not only arguing its case, it was shaping what people heard. Public television, friendly newspapers, state advertising, and paid posts on Facebook are all pushing the same line about immigration. I checked this across all 26 countries, not just the three. The more a government used social media to spread misleading claims, the more the educated moved towards restriction. That held even when I removed Hungary from the sums. What did not explain it was ordinary parties all sounding tough on immigration. It is not the argument that counts. It is whether you ever hear the other side.
There is a comforting answer to all this. If the television and the papers are controlled, people will just go online and find something better. I expected to see that. I did not. In the countries under populist rule, 77 per cent of the most educated were online every day, for about three hours. Among the least educated, it was 22 per cent, and the typical person in that group spent no time online at all. So the people with the most choice were the graduates. Yet among those graduates, the ones who spent hours online every day shifted just as much as the ones who barely used it. Posting about politics made no reliable difference either. Nobody seemed to find a way around the message. One honest limit: the survey asks how long people are online, not where they go, so I cannot see what anyone was reading. But the idea that the internet automatically rescues people from a controlled press did not hold up here. That is worth sitting with, because a lot of us rely on it.
One last thing, and it is the part I keep thinking about. The educated did not become hostile. They became conditional. They moved from ‘let people in’ to ‘let fewer in, but only some’ — while keeping exactly the same views on gay rights, which those same governments were also attacking. The least educated moved somewhere much harder: into outright hostility to immigrants. So this is not a collapse of liberal values. It is a retreat on the one subject the state shouted loudest about. Hungary will now test whether it can be undone. In April 2026, Péter Magyar’s party won a landslide and ended sixteen years of rule by Fidesz. If I am right, educated Hungarians should regain ground as the news opens up, though tolerance overall may stay low, because the new government is still tough on migration. The lesson is uncomfortable. Sending more people to university will not, on its own, protect a country’s openness. Keeping many independent voices alive will. That is a job for all of us, not something a degree can do for you.
Read the full paper (open access): Abbas, T. (2026). ‘Who Reacts to Populist Power? Education, Information Environments, and Immigration Tolerance in 26 European Countries.’ Social Science Quarterly, 107: e70220. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.70220