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So happy this is out #openaccess in @apsrjournal! If you study or teach comparative politics, political economy, democracy, autocracy, #education, development, or methods, this article has sth for you. Thread:
https://cup.org/3hzmCTD
#polisciresearch #EconTwitter #econhist
https://cup.org/3hzmCTD
#polisciresearch #EconTwitter #econhist
You've probably learned in comparative politics/ political economy/ #econhist classes that #democratization was an important driver of the expansion of primary/ basic/ mass #education. In this article, I show it wasn't: Most of the expansion of mass educ occurred before democracy
#1: Central governments began to regulate primary schools on avg 60-100 years *before* a country transitioned to democracy for the first time.
You can access the original database I created on the timing of state intervention in primary educ here https://tinyurl.com/y49tnyu8
You can access the original database I created on the timing of state intervention in primary educ here https://tinyurl.com/y49tnyu8
#2: There was A LOT of primary education provision under non-democracies. By the time a country democratized for the 1st time, on avg 70% of children were already enrolled in primary school! (Panel A) i.e., most of the expansion of mass education took place under non-democracies
#3: On average, democratization did not lead to the expansion of primary education. Past studies that find a positive relationship are cross-sectional OR they look *within* democratizing countries (black line) but do not consider that non-democ's (grey line) saw expansion too:
The #precisenull effect of democratization on primary schooling holds whether you look at the long period 1820-2015 or the recent postwar period that most past studies focus on. When u add country and year FE and cntry-specific time trends, the effect of democracy disappears
Even if we take the upper bound of 95% CIs in models with country & year FE (5.7 p.p. on avg across all democ measures) or models w/ country-specific time trends (5.8 p.p. on avg), the effect of democratization is SMALL: recall enrollment exceeded 70% *before* democratization
4#: I test three explanations for why democratization doesn't increase primary school coverage: (1) the median voter already had access to prim educ; (2) rich voters capture the new democracies; (3) the new democracies are not left-wing. I find most support for (1).
A central question that emerges from this article for future comparative politics & @econhist research is WHY was there so much provision of primary schooling under non-democracies?
The article provides lots of qualitative data and exploratory quant tests for 4 common arguments about why autocracies provide mass education: (1) to indoctrinate; (2) industrialize; (3) redistribute toward the poor in left-wing democracies; or (4) a part of global isomorphism.
This is the first @apsrjournal article to use Annotations for Transparent Inquiry ( #ATI) to provide qualitative evidence. I use ATI to illustrate autocrats' arguments for mass educ (example below). You can view all the qualitative evidence in this HTML: https://tinyurl.com/y4wom9hs
tldr: The claim that democracy drove the expansion of mass education *assumes* the median voter lacked access to educ under autocracy. I show that when this assumption holds, democ leads to educ expansion, BUT in 75% of countries that democratized, this assumption does not hold.
