Educating the Opposition: The Politics of Authoritarian Investment in Talent

• In Event: Shaping Minds, Securing Power: State-Directed Education and Cultural Hegemony in Eurasia

Abstract

Can authoritarian regimes invest in public education without jeopardizing their hold on power? Recent work has argued autocracies regularly turn to their education systems to indoctrinate and train the next generation of leaders, but supporting free inquiry can also trigger demands for greater democratization and participation in politics. In this paper, we examine the effects of a massive program run by authoritarian regimes to incentivize education among the best and brightest: Russia’s prestigious Olimpiada competition. After building a novel dataset of roughly 18,000 school-age participants, we apply a regression discontinuity design to analyze the effect of winning free admission to any domestic university on a variety of downstream political outcomes, including support for Russia’s main opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Our results reveal a basic trade-off underlying state-sponsored education. The Putin regime has been successful in achieving its primary goal of preventing brain drain: winning students are more likely to remain in Russia for their university studies. But these same “best and brightest” students funnel to Russia’s most prestigious universities, where they are exposed to liberal ideas and later are more likely to support the opposition. Education systems run by authoritarian governments may be best understood as a double-edged sword with regards to regime durability.

Authors

• Polina Protozanova, George Washington U

• David Szakonyi, George Washington U