The Politics of Education in Autocracies

• In Event: Education, Civil Society, and Autocracy

Abstract

India, the second largest country in the world, has been a democracy since it gained its independence in 1947. The world’s third and fourth largest countries—the United States and Indonesia—are also governed democratically (at least for now). From a global perspective, however, democracies like India, Indonesia, and the US are the exceptions. For vast swaths of our world’s population, the rule is authoritarian. Taken together, today’s largest ten autocracies subsume about 2.2 billion people. China is at the top of this list, of course, the autocratic elephant in the room. But that room is awfully crowded. Suffice it to say that much of the developing world—indeed, much of the planet—is already governed by dictatorships, and what remains, or a good part of it, appears headed in that direction. So how does this story end? Just how bad could it get?

Barring a midcourse correction (and looking well beyond the next US presidential election), the answer will come down to education. If autocracies can do a decent job of educating kids and young adults, perhaps that dark future into which we now seem to be heading will not be so dark after all. Let’s be clear: When it comes to education, democracies have not exactly covered themselves in glory. Maybe autocrats can do it better. Here, perhaps, is a ray of hope, one of precious few as we move headlong into the age of populism and, one suspects, yet more autocracy.

My APSA paper will take a closer look at that glimmering ray of sunshine. While other observers of autocratic education might focus on its monetary aspects, I filter those out, the better to see—and, as best I can, try to understand—the complete picture. And rather than focus on a particular country or region, my paper considers the perspective of authoritarian elites in general. Stepping back from individual cases, the paper describes how autocrats think about education. Following their train of thought, I explain how the schools and universities found in today’s autocratic countries serve the political purposes of the autocrats who run them. Pedagogically-sound learning objectives, academic rigor, the interests of children, the concerns of parents—all take a backseat to the autocrats’ political interests. The paper delves into those interests and shows how the defining features of autocratic education systems emerge out of them. Along the way, I also explore whether autocracies really have done a better job of delivering quality schools and universities. New datasets produced by the OECD and World Bank allow this question to be addressed more systematically than has been possible in the past. Tapping into these rich new data sources, my analysis finds that, as a general rule, children schooled in autocracies are in fact no better-educated than their counterparts in democracies. If anything, the academic performance of public schools and universities in autocracies tends to be lower, not higher. I also find that the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences are not as big a draw in autocracies as these disciplines are in democracies.

The paper concludes by exploring the impact of regime type on university enrollment rates. By the time they reach their late teens, many kids educated in autocracies are exasperated. Feeling stifled both inside and outside the classroom, they crave the mind-expanding opportunities that a university education permits. Many of these students—including many young women—are also hungry for social change. Universities are hotbeds of student-led activism. They are where the harshest critics of autocratic regimes congregate and study and organize. And for that reason—because kids in college are more likely to be free thinkers, more likely to want to disrupt the social order—authoritarian leaders are deeply ambivalent about their universities. My analysis highlights one way autocrats deal with this ambivalence: they hold down university enrollments. Low university enrollment rates serves a second purpose as well. In addition to reducing the political threat posed by universities, holding down university enrollments keeps universities exclusive. If things go well, members of the ruling class can look forward to sending their sons and daughters to public universities whose student rosters are dominated by kids from similarly distinguished backgrounds.

Unfortunately, then, after subjecting autocracy’s hopeful light beam to my new, broader theoretical understanding of autocratic politics—and subjecting it to new empirical tests as well—I find nothing to suggest that a future under autocracy would be any brighter than today’s rather dreary educational status quo. Even when it comes to education, the one policy realm in which uninformed observers might have thought autocracies deserved high marks, both the empirics and my theory would suggest a grade closer to a disappointing D-minus.

Author

• Lloyd Gruber, London School of Economics