By examining countries around the world it has been found that the level of education in a country and the presence of democracy are highly correlated. In Why Does Democracy Need Education, authors Edward L. Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto and Andrei Shleifer investigate why stable democracies are rare outside countries with high levels of education. They set out to support their theory that education promotes democracy because it reduces the costs (or increases the benefits) of political activity. They find that as education increases you have a larger group of people capable and willing to take an active role in politics giving birth to democracy or further sustaining an already democratic government.
They first explore the relationship between a number of countries forms of government and education levels. The empirical evidence they gather ends up supporting Lipset’s (1960) hypothesis that education is highly correlated with democracy in both cross-section and panel regressions with fixed effects, to control for any effect geography, culture or other country characteristics may have on both education and democracy. This effect seemed to be causal, as they found countries with higher levels of education more likely to transition from dictatorship to democracy.
They next explore existing hypotheses explaining the link between education and political participation. The first is the belief that encouraging political participation is an integral part of any education system. Political participation is taught to be good in democracies, a fact that sustains democracies and leads to their emergence. A second insists that the education system is teaching valuable social skills that make it easy for people to interact with one another. This lowers the cost of social interaction, making any type of interaction between groups of people easier, political participation included. A third holds that a higher level of education increases individual’s effectiveness and cognitive capabilities providing society with more people capable of participating in politics. A final hypothesis holds that it is the education system’s requirement of sit-in classroom sessions that makes people more tolerant of sitting through meetings or waiting in line to vote. They set up a number of studies to explore these hypotheses.
They began their research by looking at results from the World Values Survey and discovered a highly statistically significant relationship between education in a country and the amount of participation in different social activities. There was no way to distinguish among the various theories for causality stated before. They then decided to look at more specific individual-level evidence from the United States. The General Social Survey (GSS) and the DDB Needham Lifestyles Survey were used to run a few regressions. Regressions were carried out comparing education to church attendance, class/seminar attendance, participation in community projects, writing a letter to a newspaper, contacting a public official, registering to vote and finally, an anti-social form of behavior, giving someone the finger. All these social actions showed strong positive association with years of schooling, except giving someone the finger, which had a negative association. With this evidence they then turned to see if they could distinguish between the existing alternative hypotheses.
The data gathered showed that education led to many social activities apart from politics, which the authors claim takes away from the theory that education simply indoctrinates political participation. Another hypothesis that seems inconsistent with their findings was the private benefits hypothesis. Education was found to influence both suicide bombing and voting both of which don’t really give private rewards such as greater leadership capabilities. The theory that best explains the empirical data is that the education systems teach valuable social skills that increase participation in all forms of social activities.
This increase in social skills acquired through education reduces the cost of involvement in civic affairs. By reducing cost they mean making it easier for everyone in the community to take an active role in politics. It makes it easier for everyone to communicate, delegate, lead, etc. Using this evidence Glaeser, Pozetto and Shleifer present a model explaining the relationship between education and democracy, and why increased education increases a democracy’s stability. The critical point involves, first, acknowledging that a democracy requires the support of a broad base of citizens who have a weak incentive to fight for it, while dictatorships, on the other hand, provide stronger incentives but to a much smaller group of individuals. This is true in that it is easier to motivate a smaller group of people to support ones ideas than it is a larger group. In other words, as a group gets larger, individuals feel less responsible for the well being of the group as a whole. Because of this we are left with democracies as regimes whose benefits are distributed among large number of citizens, and dictatorships as regimes whose beneficiaries are few in number. The only way democracy will work is if the cost of political participation becomes small enough that individuals won’t require large incentive to participate. This is where the role of education becomes critical, because it is the level of education in a country that has been found to reduce the cost of political participation. As education increases you have a larger group of people capable and willing to take an active role in politics giving birth to democracy or further sustaining an already democratic government.
These predictions seem to match up well when compared to historical evidence. By looking throughout history one will notice that countries that become more educated greatly increase their probability of seeing a democratic revolution. Also countries that had high education levels were also better able to fend off dictatorial coups. The empirical evidence presented by Glaeser, Ponzetto, and Shleifer leave us with little hope for successful democracies to ever be established in countries with low levels of education.
I felt that the different sections of the paper could have congealed together in a smoother fashion. There seemed to be some disconnects as I passed from section to section, with not enough focus on driving home the main theory as to why democracy needs education.
Also I believe they underestimated the impact that education has in directly encouraging political participation. Yes, other forms of civic participation are a result of education, many of which are apolitical, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the encouragement of democratic participation within the schools can’t also be a major reason for increased political participation along with the theory that education simply increases all forms of civic participation and socialization. It is stated in the paper that, “In democracies, schools teach their students that political participation is good.” To prove that this fact isn’t impacting political participation one would need to find and examine a democracy in which the education system does not encourage political participation at all, and see if it has a similar political participation rate found in other educated countries.