From education to democracy?

2004·1 MB·English

by  Acemoglu, Daron

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Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology
Department ofEconomics
Working Paper Series
From Education to Democracy?
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson,
James A. Robinson,
Pierre Yared
Working Paper 05-04
December 15, 2004
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From Education to Democracy?*
Daron Acemoglu^ Simon Johnson1 James A. Robinson^
Pierre Yared^
This Version: December 2004.
Abstract
The conventional wisdom views high levels of education as a prerequisite for
democracy. Thispapershowsthatexistingevidenceforthisviewisbasedoncross-
sectionalcorrelations, whichdisappearoncewelookat within-country variation. In
other words, there is no evidence that countries that increase their education are
morehkelyto become democratic.
Keywords: democracy, education, institutions, political development.
JEL Classification: P16, O10.
'PreparedfortheAmericanEconomicAssociationPapersandProceedings2005.
^Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 50 Memorial Drive, MA02139.
e-mail: [email protected].
*SloanSchoolofManagementandInternationalMonetaryFund, MassachusettsInstituteofTechnol-
ogy, 50MemorialDrive, MA02139. e-mail: [email protected], [email protected].
^HarvardUniversity,DepartmentofGovernment,Littauer, 1875CambridgeSt.,CambridgeMA02138;
e-mail: [email protected].
^Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 50 Memorial Drive, MA02139.
e-mail: [email protected].

.
1 Introduction
The conventional wisdom, since at least the writings ofJohn Dewey (1916), views high
levels of educational attainment as a prerequisite for democracy. Education is argued
topromote democracy both because it enables a "culture ofdemocracy" to develop, and
becauseitleadstogreaterprosperity,whichisalsothoughttocausepoliticaldevelopment.
The most celebrated version of this argument is modernization theory, popularized by
SeymourMartinLipset (1959),whichemphasizestheroleofeducationaswellaseconomic
growthinpromotingpoliticaldevelopmentingeneralanddemocracyinparticular. Lipset,
for example, argues that
"Education presumably broadens men's outlooks, enables them to under-
stand the need for norms of tolerance, restrains them from adhering to ex-
tremist and monistic doctrinies, and increases their capacity to makerational
electoral choices." (p. 79),
and concludes
"Ifwe cannot say that a "high" level ofeducation is asufficient condition
for democracy, theavailableevidencedoessuggestthatitcomesclosetobeing
anecessary condition" (p. 80)
Recent empirical work, for example, by Robert Barro (1999) and Adam Przeworski,
Michael Alvarez, Jose A. Cheibub and Fernando Limongi (2000), provides evidence con-
sistent with this view. Edward Glaeser, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes and
Andrei Shleifer (2004) go further and argue that differences in schooling are a major
causal factorexplainingnot onlydifferencesindemocracy, but moregenerallyinpolitical
institutions, and provide evidence consistent with this view.
The high correlation between schooling and democracy, depicted in Figure 1, is the
cornerstone of this view. This figure shows the most common measure of democracy,
the Freedom House index of political rights, against the average years of schooling of
the population in the 1990s (see below for data details). Correlation does not establish
causation, however.
Existing literature looks at the cross-sectional correlation between education and
democracy rather than at the within variation. Hence existing inferences may be po-
tentially driven byomittedfactors influencingbotheducation anddemocracyinthelong
run. A causal link between education and democracy suggests that we should also see a
relationshipbetween changes in education and changes in democracy. In otherwords, we
should ask whether agiven country (with its other characteristics held constant) is more
likely to become more democratic as its population becomes more educated. We show
that the answer tothis question is no. Figure 2 illustrates this by plotting the change in
the FreedomHousedemocracyscorebetween 1970 and 1995versus thechangein average
years of schooling during the same time period. Countries that become more educated
show no greater tendency to become more democratic. In this light, the pattern in Fig-
ure 1 seems to be driven by some common omitted factors affecting both education and
democracy.
We further investigate these issues econometrically. We show that the cross-sectional
relationship between schooling and democracy disappears when country fixed effects are
includedintheregression. Althoughfixedeffectsregressionsarenot apanaceaagainst all
biases arising in pooled OLS regressions, they are very useful in removing the potential
long-run determinants of both education and democracy. We also document that the
lack of a relationship between education and democracy is highly robust to different
econometric techniques, to estimation in various different samples, and to the inclusion
ofdifferent sets ofcovariates.
TherecentpaperGlaeser,etal. (2004) alsoexploitsthetime-seriesvariationindemoc-
racy and education, and presents evidence that changes in schooling predict changes in
democracy andotherpolitical institutions. However, wedocument belowthat this result
stems from their omission of time effects in the regressions, so it reflects the over-time
increase in education and democracy at the world level over the past 35 years. Once we
include year dummies in their regressions, the impact ofeducation on democracy disap-
pears entirely. Motivated by the Glaeser, et al. (2004) paper, we also show that there is
no effect ofeducation on other measures ofpolitical institutions.
In addition to thestudies mentioned above, our paper is related to the large political
economyliteratureonthecreationandconsolidationofdemocracy, whichwedonothave
enough space to discuss here (see Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, 2004, for a
discussion ofthis literature). It is also related to our companion paper by Acemoglu, Si-
monJohnson, Robinson andPierreYared (2004),whichinvestigatestheotherbasictenet
ofthe modernization hypothesis, that income (and economic growth) causes democracy.
Inthatpaper,usingbothfixedeffectsOLSandinstrumentalvariableregressions,weshow
that there is little evidence in favor ofa causal effect from income to democracy either.
We alsooffer atheoryforthe differences inlong-runfactorscausingthejointevolutionof
education, income, and democracy, and we providesupporting evidencefor this theory.