Why does democracy need education?

By Edward L. Glaeser, G. Ponzetto, A. Shleifer. 2007

732 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Across countries, education and democracy are highly correlated. We motivate empirically and then model a causal mechanism explaining this correlation. In our model, schooling teaches people to interact with others and raises the benefits of civic participation, including voting and organizing. In the battle between democracy and dictatorship, democracy has a wide potential base of support but offers weak incentives to its defenders. Dictatorship provides stronger incentives to a narrower base. As education raises the benefits of civic engagement, it raises participation in support of a broad-based regime (democracy) relative to that in support of a narrow-based regime (dictatorship). This increases the likelihood of successful democratic revolutions against dictatorships, and reduces that of successful anti-democratic coups.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7cf16b3e9482d4536bac80746890d594f18d564a

Citations in the corpus

• Political Versus Economic Institutions in the Growth Process (2014, unknown): “7See Acemoglu et al. (2002), Easterly and Levine (2003), Dollar and Kraay (2003), Glaeser et al. (2004), Acemoglu et al. (2005), and Glaeser et al. (2007).”
• On the Distribution of Education and Democracy (2006, unknown): “…when we control for country-specific effects and take into account the cross-country variation in the data, the results are akin to those obtained by Barro (1999), Glaeser et al. (2004, 2007) and Papaioannou and Siourounis (2005), who provide evidence of a positive impact of education on democracy.”
• Culture and Institutions (2015, unknown): “They will punish 54 Glaeser, Ponzetto, and Shleifer (2007) argue that human capital is another precondition for democratic institutions to work.”
• Teaching Practices and Social Capital (2013, unknown): “There is some evidence that a greater quantity of schooling leads to higher social capital (Milligan, Moretti, and Oreopoulos 2004; Helliwell and Putnam 2007; Glaeser, Ponzetto, and Shleifer 2007) and has other desirable nonpecuniary benefits (Oreopoulos and Salvanes 2011).”
• Green Returns to Education: Does Schooling Contribute to Pro-Environmental Behaviours? Evidence from Thailand (2017, unknown): “, 2011), fertility (Osili and Long, 2008; Wolpin and Todd, 2006) and civic participation (Castelló-Climent, 2008; Dee, 2004; Glaeser et al., 2007).”
• Regulation and Distrust (2010, unknown): “As stressed by Almond and Verba (1989), Putnam (2001), Helliwell and Putnam (2007) and Glaeser et al. (2007), education is strongly associated with civic behaviors.”
• Nation-building Through Compulsory Schooling during the Age of Mass Migration (2019, unknown): “, 1979) and economic (5)For example: (i) Native American children being sent to boarding schools in the early nineteenth century; (ii) the dispatch of American teachers to Puerto Rico and the Philippines after the Spanish-American war; (iii) attempts to democratise Germany and Japan after World War ”
• The democratic transition (2013, unknown): “…and democracy has ignited a debate between the advocates of institutions as the prime engine of growth (Acemoglu et al. 2001, 2002), and the proponents of a different thesis, who view human capital as the root cause of economic development (Glaeser et al. 2004, 2007; Glaeser and Campante 2009).”
• Understanding Long-Run African Growth: Colonial Institutions or Colonial Education? (2008, unknown): “institutional indices by Glaeser et al. (2004) who note that these index measures tend to reflect short-”
• Convergence and Modernization Revisited (2012, unknown): “Additional supporting analysis along these lines appears in Glaeser , la Porta , Lopez - de - Silanes , and Shleifer ( 2004 ) and Glaeser , Ponzetto , and Shleifer ( 2007 ) .”