How does access to education influence political candidacy? Lessons from school openings in Sweden

Karl-Oskar Lindgren (), Sven Oskarsson () and Mikael Persson ()
Additional contact information
Karl-Oskar Lindgren: IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, Postal: Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
Sven Oskarsson: Uppsala universitet, Postal: Uppsala, Sweden
Mikael Persson: Göteborgs universitet, Postal: Göteborg, Sweden

No 2016:7, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: How does availability of education affect who becomes a political representative? Theorists have pointed out access to education as a key to a well-functioning democracy, but few empirical studies have examined how changes in the access to education influence the chances of becoming a politician. In this paper we analyze the effects of a substantial series of school openings during the early 20th century in Sweden which provided adolescents with better access to secondary education. We use unique administrative data pertaining to the entire Swedish population born between 1916 and 1945. According to our empirical results the opening of a new lower secondary school in a municipality increased the baseline probability of running for political office by more than 10 percent and the probability of holding office by more than 20 percent.

Keywords: education; political representation; elections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H70 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2016-04-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-his and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2016/wp2016 ... itical-candidacy.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2016_007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).