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The Logic of Pro-Poor Policymaking: Political Entrepreneurship and Mass Education
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2013
Abstract
This article argues against the scholarly consensus that governments make pro-poor policies when they are democratic. In democracies and autocracies, a government's strongest incentive is to serve citizens who are organized, and poor citizens face collective-action disadvantages. But a ‘political entrepreneur’ can help poor citizens organize and attain power with their support; to stay in power, the political entrepreneur's incentive is to maintain poor citizens’ support with pro-poor policies. Politics and education are analyzed over half-a-century in countries with little in common – Ghana, Taiwan, and Brazil. Governments that expanded education for the poor were more often autocratic than democratic, but were always clearly associated with political entrepreneurs. The results suggest an alternative understanding of government incentives to serve poor citizens.
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Footnotes
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (email: [email protected]). The author thanks Tarek Masoud, Irfan Nooruddin, Gustav Ranis, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Frances Rosenbluth, Ken Shadlen, Richard Snyder, and Jennifer Tobin, as well as three anonymous referees for this Journal, for their insightful and constructive comments on earlier iterations. This article is part of a larger project on how governments decide to produce education, for which the author gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, the Yale Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy, and the Brookings Institution.
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