EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Why does democracy need education?

Edward Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto and Andrei Shleifer

Journal of Economic Growth, 2007, vol. 12, issue 2, 77-99

Abstract: Across countries, education and democracy are highly correlated. We motivate empirically and then model a causal mechanism explaining this correlation. In our model, schooling teaches people to interact with others and raises the benefits of civic participation, including voting and organizing. In the battle between democracy and dictatorship, democracy has a wide potential base of support but offers weak incentives to its defenders. Dictatorship provides stronger incentives to a narrower base. As education raises the benefits of civic engagement, it raises participation in support of a broad-based regime (democracy) relative to that in support of a narrow-based regime (dictatorship). This increases the likelihood of successful democratic revolutions against dictatorships, and reduces that of successful anti-democratic coups. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Keywords: Democracy; Education; Political participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (328)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10887-007-9015-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Why does democracy need education? (2007) Downloads
Working Paper: Why Does Democracy Need Education? (2006) Downloads
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:kap:jecgro:v:12:y:2007:i:2:p:77-99

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10887/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10887-007-9015-1

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Growth is currently edited by Oded Galor

More articles in Journal of Economic Growth from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:kap:jecgro:v:12:y:2007:i:2:p:77-99