Teachers against Landlords: Landlessness and Compliance with Compulsory Education

• In Event: Spatial Distributive Politics Using Geospatial and Machine Learning Techniques

Abstract

Primary education can transform masses into loyal, nationalistic, and indoctrinated citizens through language instruction and nationalistic curricula. Just as national education favors nation-making and indoctrination, thus attachment to the central state, it threatens local elites’ social and cultural authority. We theorize that attendance in primary schools, or citizens’ compliance with mandatory education policies, should be lower in places where local population is more dependent on traditional and economic local elites. Specifically, we hypothesize that high landlessness and land inequality would decrease school attendance rates. We test this argument using a novel method, a spatial first-difference design, and an original dataset that combines archival data on landless farmers, local landlords, and rural primary school attendance rates from Turkey. We find that the percentage of landless farmer families significantly and negatively impacts compulsory primary school enrollment and hence, the nation-making project of the early Republican political elites. We also find that enrollment increased in districts that experienced a decrease in the percentage of landless farmer households through the land distribution reform of 1945.

Authors

• Tugba Bozcaga, King's College London

• Asli Cansunar, University of Washington