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Learning Democracy: Education and the Fall of Authoritarian Regimes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2013

Howard Sanborn  and
Clayton L. Thyne
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Abstract

Studies on what causes a state to democratize have focused on economic, social, and international factors. Many of them argue that higher levels of education should promote democracy. However, few articulate clearly how education affects democratization, and fewer still attempt to test the supposed link across time and space. This article fills that gap by considering how different levels of education influence democratization, and the conditions under which education is most likely to promote democracy. Analyses of eighty-five authoritarian spells from 1970 to 2008 find that higher levels of mass, primary, and tertiary education are robustly associated with democratization. Secondary analyses indicate that education is most effective in promoting democratization when both males and females are educated. An illustration from Tunisia follows.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 773 - 797
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

Department of International Studies and Political Science, Virginia Military Institute (email: [email protected]); Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky (email: [email protected]). A previous version of this article was presented at the 2012 annual conference of the Midwest Political Science Association (Chicago, IL). The authors would like to thank Allison Boyd, as well as the Editor of the British Journal of Political Science, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this article. Replication data and estimation routines are available at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JPS and http://www.uky.edu/~clthyn2/research.htm

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