Education and Political Participation in sub-Saharan Africa

• In Event: The Political Economy of Education in the Developing World

Abstract

Education features prominently in many theories of democratic transition and consolidation. These theories have been empirically tested to varying degrees, with the lion’s share of evidence to-date situated in high-income countries. The existing causal evidence of the relationship between education and political participation in sub-Saharan Africa is limited and provides conflicting evidence in terms of both the nature and direction of the relationship. In this analysis, I investigate the relationship between education and political participation in sub-Saharan Africa through a natural experiment exploiting variation in access to primary education created through school fee abolishment (SFA) policies, a common policy on the continent in the 1990s and early 2000s. Using an instrumental variable model, I compare the political participation of cohorts who would have benefitted from increased access to schooling due to school fee abolishment to cohorts who were just too old to have done so. To capture partial treatment effects for those of primary school age at the time of the policy change, I vary treatment dosage by the length of time a cohort was likely to have benefitted from free education. My analysis uses data from the Afrobarometer survey and includes 14 countries over time. I examine multiple forms of political participation including voting, active measures of political participation, and self-reported upport for democracy and democratic institutions. The analysis is disaggregated by gender, employment status, levels of poverty, as well as country, and finds that, on average, more education does not lead to increased political participation in sub¬-Saharan Africa and, in some cases, is associated with decreased participation. This is consistent with earlier findings from Croke et al. (2016) on Zimbabwe and is the first to examine this relationship on the African continent for multiple countries over time. This work also builds on earlier analyses through testing perceptions of corruption, strength of democratic institutions, regime type, and quality of education as potential mechanisms driving the relationship between education and political participation. My findings suggest that the relationship between education and political participation may operate differently in developing country contexts than they do in Western contexts and that this may be due in part to the strength of democratic institutions as well as the quality and content of public schooling.

Author

• Shelby Carvalho, Harvard University