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The politics of student mobility: Links between outbound student flows and the democratic development of post-Soviet Eurasia

Wed, April 17, 10:00 to 11:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific C

Proposal

Building on the existing scarce data and theorisation (Atkinson, 2010; Puryear, 1994; Spilimbergo, 2009), the paper examines possible links between student mobility and democratic transitions of their home countries, thus adding to the limited comparative and international education literature on the former Soviet countries. Theoretically-informed analysis of cross-sectional data shows that the former Soviet countries with higher proportions of students studying in Europe or the United States have achieved higher levels of democratic development. In contrast, countries with higher proportions of students studying in the most popular, authoritarian destination - Russia - have reached significantly lower levels of democratic development. This paper does not assume democracy is the ‘holy grail’ but takes democracy for what it is - a state system that can be measured. The study uses ideas of democratic socialisation at universities as well as apprenticeships in democracy to advance the intellectual agenda of linking two fields - educational studies and political science.

This study uses secondary data sourced from the UNESCO and the Economist Intelligence Unit to establish associations between outbound student mobility to democratic vs authoritarian countries and levels of democratic development. Definitions of democracy differ and there exist various democracy indices: Freedom House, Polity, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Bertelsmann Democracy Index. The analysis of the indices from each of these sources for the former Soviet countries shows very high correlations between 0.89 and 0.98 (p=.000). The index used in this study was sourced from the Economist Intelligence Unit and measures the following five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2015, p. 45).

A change of political culture is a complex process that is often determined by a variety of social, cultural, political, and economic factors. Estimating the possible association between student mobility and attained democracy in the former Soviet countries is a task that requires continued effort in a number of different directions, both empirically and conceptually.

The idea that student mobility to Europe and the USA may be associated with the democratisation of less democratic countries in the European neighbourhood appears to be empirically verifiable at the macro level. At the same time, student mobility to Russia is linked with lower levels of democratic development of the former Soviet countries. Empirically, the directionality of the relationship is yet unclear. The explanation that this paper develops conceptually is that studying in countries with high levels of attained democracy may be linked with the democratic socialization of individuals and the development of their civic consciousness; these may directly or indirectly influence different aspects of democracy that form part of the EIU measure used in this study: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. Based on the existing literature and theorization on potential contributions that migrants can make to the democratic development of their home countries and domestic politics, the final section discusses potential ways in which outbound student mobility can influence democratic transitions.

In the Humboldtian tradition, universities in democratic settings have a critical function in the formation and development of democratic societies. Universities can serve as key institutions for the transmission of democratic values and may be viewed as ‘core social institution[s] shaping democratic development’ (Plantan, 2002, p. 6). It has been argued that ‘in many countries, universities have incubated advanced participatory democratic forms’ (Marginson, 2018, p. 16). The development of democratic governance depends not only on the formation of institutions but also on the development of individuals’ understanding of how these institutions function (Atkinson, 2010). Therefore, such ‘apprenticeships in democracy’ may be transformative for those who come from less democratic settings as ‘the most powerful meaning of democracy is formed […] in the details of everyday life’ (Apple & Beane, 1995, p. 103).

Mobile students represent a group of migrants. Civic consciousness develops differently for individuals when they become immigrants and depart from the familiar to the unknown; their immediate communities change. Relatedness, similarities, and sameness become pronounced. Immigrants need to learn about unfamiliar realities and adjust by creating and sometimes reinventing their identities. ‘Within conditions of disequilibrium in which student subjects manage their lives reflexively, fashioning their own changing identities’ (Marginson, 2014, p. 6), individuals may absorb novel knowledge and familiarize themselves with political practices which they can transmit to their home countries. Although the statistics on returnees to the former Soviet countries are not readily available, eight out of the fifteen countries operate government scholarship programmes and scholarship recipients are normally required to return home after completing their studies abroad (Todua, 2017). Migrant returnees as agents of democratic diffusion may import new political values, knowledge on the day-to-day functioning of democratic institutions, and expectations on how governments and citizens operate in the contexts of democratic culture. To quote Jeffrey Puryear (1994), who demonstrates the extraordinary role played by foreign-educated individuals in Chile’s shift from authoritarian to democratic rule, they may ‘produce ideologies, bringing the broad world of ideas and critical attitude to bear on their surroundings’ (p. 8). In his book Thinking Politics, Puryear (1994) refers to these individuals as intellectuals and argues that the majority were social scientists educated at the graduate level in the USA and Europe. Foreign-educated intellectuals, in the words of O’Donnell & Schmitter (1986) who Puryear cites, contributed to the ‘resurrection of civil society’ that preceded the democratic transition.

Recognizing that democratic socialisation can be one imaginable outcome of studying abroad, future research will need to improve our knowledge on how student sojourners who come from less/non-democratic contexts rediscover, remake and reorganize the idea of political democracy while studying at universities abroad and how they utilise these new ideas after finishing their studies. Such research will advance our empirical and conceptual understanding of the democratic socialization potential of higher education.

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