The Causal Effect of Political Power on the Provision of Public Education: Evidence from a Weighted Voting System

Erik Lindgren (), Per Pettersson-Lidbom () and Björn Tyrefors
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Erik Lindgren: Department of Economics, Stockholm University

No 1315, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of political power on the provision of public education. We use data from a historical nondemocratic society with a weighted voting system where eligible voters received votes in proportion to their taxable income and without any limit on the maximum of votes, i.e., the political system used in Swedish local governments during the period 1862-1909. We use a novel identification strategy where we combine two different identification strategies, i.e., a threshold regression analysis and a generalized event-study design, both of which exploit nonlinearities or discontinuities in the effect of political power between two opposing local elites: agricultural landowners and emerging industrialists. The results suggest that school spending is approximately 90-120% higher if the nonagrarian interest controls all of the votes compared to when landowners have more than a majority of votes. Moreover, we find no evidence that the concentration of landownership affected this relationship.

Keywords: political power; Provision of public education; Causal effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 I25 N34 O15 O43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2020-01-27, Revised 2021-05-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: The causal effect of political power on the provision of public education: Evidence from a weighted voting system (2021)
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