By Sword and Market: The Comparative Politics of Education Regimes

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political science has long recognized that education has important effects on redistribution and the socialization of citizens. This panel looks to advance this research agenda by asking questions about the political origins of education's socializing mission, as well growing inequalities in contemporary education provision regimes. The papers on the panel are concerned with two central questions: What explains the origins of, and variation between, mass education systems in an era of nation building and state formation? And second, what explains public education's contemporary neglect in an era where education is seen as crucial for economic mobility and reducing inequality? The panel brings together four papers with empirical evidence drawn from distinct historical periods across Europe, Latin America, and South Asia and tackles questions at the heart of this year's conference theme, namely democratization and inequality. Through studying the politics of education, the papers in the panel provide answers to patterns of historical and contemporary inequality by explaining variation in investment and under-investment in education across a range of cases, as well as the effects education has on bureaucratic politics and political behavior of recipients.

Lopez and Paglayan study the role education plays in state formation in Europe and the Americas, while Clough and Davies explore how education politics both reflects the contemporary state, and shapes redistributive goals of the state in India. Drawing on an original dataset of laws and institutions in 19th Century Europe and Latin America, Lopez's paper shows how education coincided with other goals of state formation, namely making populations legible through national censuses, and "civilizing" masses, and ascribes causal power to ideas at critical junctures of state formation to explain variation in regimes of mass education across Europe and the Americas. Paglayan's paper advances a material explanation for the incentives of elites to invest in mass education, arguing that the threat of social conflict and unrest explains the expansion of mass education in four nation-states across Europe and the Americas. Clough and Davies's papers look to explain the changing nature of contemporary service provision regimes in India, specifically the growing rise of non-state providers in education. Clough's paper looks at the effects that NGOs, a large actor in service provision across low- and middle-income countries, to understand the effects they have on the provision of public education. The paper finds that NGOs can have distinct effects dependent on the levels of corruption of teachers in government schools. In contrast to Lopez and Paglayan, Davies's paper studies a relative late comer in the expansion of mass education, India, to understand its contemporary form. India has only expanded mass education since the mid-1990s, and the resulting service provision regime is comprised of large numbers of private actors. Why? The paper argues that contemporary attempts to expand mass education rely on processes that allow for private providers to also grow. Together, the four papers on the panels suggest new avenues for study in the politics of education, including shifting our analytical lens to the role ideas and historical processes have played in the emergence and development of service provision regimes.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Cosponsor

• Related Groups / Education Politics and Policy

Individual Presentations

• Explaining Divergent Effects of NGO Schools on Government Schools in Rajasthan - Emily R. Clough, Northeastern University

• From States to Markets: The Growth of Non-State Service Providers in India - Emmerich Davies, Harvard University

• State Formation and the Evolution of Mass Education - David Lopez, New York University

• Teaching Social Order: Domestic Conflict, State-Building, & the Spread of Education - Agustina S Paglayan, UCSD

Chair

• Jane R. Gingrich University of Oxford

Discussants

• David Stasavage New York University

• David J. Samuels University of Minnesota, Twin Cities