Dictators and Universities

• In Event: How the State Shapes Society: Comparative Education Politics

Abstract

Dictators face a number of trade-offs trying to secure their hold on power. They need to carefully consider who to co-opt into the ruling coalition, who to empower to enforce the monopoly of violence, who to recruit as agents of the state, and how to ensure mass compliance. Universities play an important role in the latter two tasks but can, at the same time, threaten the autocrat’s hold on power.

First, dictators need loyal and capable agents that can staff key state bureaucracies to manage the economy and provide public services. Universities have historically played an important role as suppliers of civil servants to the state, for example, by training individuals in the practice of law (Riddle 1993). Second, universities are also key in the production of religious and political ideologies and the associated training of disseminators, e.g., priests and teachers. Religious and political teaching in support of the regime is used to generate legitimacy for autocratic regimes (Cantoni et al. 2017, Alesina & Fuchs-Schündeln 2007, Paglayan 2017).

At the same time, universities are also engines of economic and political change that can threaten authoritarian survival. Universities are crucial engines of economic innovation (Valero 2016, Cantoni et al. 2014, Andrews 2017) and act as hubs of economic development by generating technological innovations, producing knowledge spill-overs, and facilitating the pooling of labor markets in university towns. The transformative effects of universities can empower new economic elites and challenge the entrenched position of regime elites. Moreover, we contend that the role universities as engines of innovation works best if the state exerts somewhat limited control over the day-to-day internal operation of institutions of higher education. Innovation requires the questioning of existing paradigms and field-specific authority. Limited regime oversight is, therefore, likely to encourage more scientific innovation (Acemoglu 2014). At the same time, however, academic freedom may also spur the development of more liberal ideologies and allow for the creation of elite networks in opposition to the regime. Dictators thus face a trade-off: granting academic freedom and encouraging scientific and political innovation in universities to foster economic growth but risking the empowerment of anti-regime elites; or tightly restricting universities and thereby hampering political and economic development. In this paper, we empirically explore this trade-off using newly collected data on universities and academic freedom in authoritarian regimes from 1800-2015.

Authors

• Florian Hollenbach, Copenhagen Business School

• Jan Henryk Pierskalla, Ohio State University