On Education and Democratic Preferences

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The views and interpretations in this document are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Inter-American Development Bank, or to any individual acting on its behalf. This paper may be freely reproduced provided credit is given to the Research Department, InterAmerican Development Bank. Terms of use: Documents inThe Research Department (RES) produces a quarterly newsletter, IDEA (Ideas for Development in the Americas), as well as working papers and books on diverse economic issues. To obtain a complete list of RES publications, and read or download them please visit our web site at: http://www.iadb.org/res.3 Abstract * This paper examines the causal link between education and democracy. Motivated by a model whereby educated individuals are in a better position to assess the effects of public policies and hence favor democracy where their opinions matter, the empirical analysis uses World Values Surveys to study the link between education and democratic attitudes. Controlling for a variety of characteristics, the paper finds that higher education levels tend to result in prodemocracy views. These results hold across countries with different levels of democracy, thus rejecting the hypothesis that indoctrination through education is an effective tool in non-democratic countries.

Democratic values, education, and political trust

“…Even in countries with democracy scores close to minimal values, individuals with more education have higher predicted levels of democratic values than those with less education. This result is consistent with the findings of Chong and Gradstein (2015), who also used data from the WVS, but employed a different measure of democratic values.…”

“…The positive effect of education on the endorsement of democratic procedures is present even if the education itself took place under a non-democratic regime, and even when looking only at the effect of primary school completion (Evans and Rose, 2007a, 2007b). Broad cross-national studies provide further evidence of the positive association between education and democratic values in countries at all levels of democracy (Chong and Gradstein, 2015).…”

Does Education Lead to Pacification? A Systematic Review of Statistical Studies on Education and Political Violence

“… 5 Hanf and Bauerle (2009) found in a study of survey data in 10 countries that there is a robust, positive relationship between high education levels and democratic attitudes on the individual level. A similar effect is documented by Chong and Gradstein (2015) studying cross-national data from the World Values Survey. …”

Political trust as a cause and consequence of democracy: Longitudinal analysis of European data

“…Education is associated with more liberal values and democratic orientations (Bobo and Licari, 1989;Hyman and Wright, 1979;McClosky and Zaller, 1984), political competence (Milligan et al, 2004), as well as with an with aversion to radical right-wing parties (Cornelis and Van Hiel, 2015;Lubbers et al, 2002) and populist parties (van Kessel et al, 2020). Further, cross-national comparisons show that individuals with more education tend to be more democratically oriented regardless of the democraticness of their country of residence (Chong and Gradstein, 2015).…”