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The Non-Democratic Roots of Mass Education: Evidence from 200 Years

Because primary education is often conceptualized as a pro-poor redistributive policy, a common argument is that democratization increases its provision. But primary education can also serve the goals of autocrats, including redistribution, promoting loyalty, nation-building, and/or industrialization. To examine the relationship between democratization and education provision empirically, I leverage new datasets covering 109 countries and 200 years. Difference-in-differences and interrupted time series estimates find that, on average, democratization had no or little impact on primary school enrollment rates. When unpacking this average null result, I find that, consistent with median voter theories, democratization can lead to an expansion of primary schooling, but the key condition under which it doeswhen a majority lacked access to primary schooling before democratizationrarely holds. Around the world, state-controlled primary schooling emerged a century before democratization, and in three-fourths of countries that democratized, a majority already had access to primary education before democratization.

Keywords
democracy; autocracy; education; human capital; indoctrination; nation-building; public goods provision; modernization theory; political economy; median voter; democratic capture
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/y9nj-4957

EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:

Paglayan, Agustina S. . (). The Non-Democratic Roots of Mass Education: Evidence from 200 Years. (EdWorkingPaper: 20-245). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/y9nj-4957

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