Abstract
Education is widely recognized as structuring emerging political divides between the new left and the far right (Stubager 2009; Häusermann and Kriesi 2015; Abou-Chadi and Hix 2021; Marks et al. 2022). However, there is ongoing uncertainty about the mechanism through which the education cleavage operates, particularly in the absence of mobilizing organizations. We fielded a survey in Germany in October 2022 (to be followed by Switzerland and the UK) to explore the hypothesis that patterns of social segregation by education create social networks which foster common identities, political attitudes, and voting behavior (consolidating key aspects of an emerging cleavage). We offer descriptive evidence that individuals tend to be embedded in educationally-distinct social networks. In turn, our preliminary findings show that network composition in terms of both level and field are associated with social identities, political attitudes, and vote choice, above and beyond individual educational characteristics.