Polarized education levels and civil unrest

Gustavo Canavire-Bacarreza, Christopher Cotton, Michael Jetter and Alejandra Montoya-Agudelo

No 1417, Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University

Abstract: After introducing a measure for educational polarization (EduPol), this paper presents a theoretical framework to understand whether and how EduPol may affect the contest for power in society. The model suggests that societies with high degrees of EduPol (i.e., substantial shares with either no or university-level education) are systematically more prone to civil unrest. We test this prediction on four measures of civil unrest: Political instability, domestic terrorism, civil conflict, and civil war. Our empirical estimations produce evidence consistent with this hypothesis as all four phenomena are positively associated with EduPol at the beginning of the respective period, exhibiting meaningful magnitudes. These results prevail when accounting for (i) potentially confounding factors, (ii) country- and time- fixed effects, (iii) economic inequality, (iv) ethnic and religious polarization and fractionalization, and (v) numerous alternative estimations and outcome variables.

Keywords: Civil conflict; civil unrest; civil war; Education polarization; Peace economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2019-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qed:wpaper:1417

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