Civil war, state consolidation, and the spread of mass education

• In Event: The politics of education in developing countries

Proposal

This article is motivated by the fact that historically, in Latin American and European countries, state-controlled primary education systems emerged and achieved considerable expansion during non-democratic regimes and in the absence of popular demand for education. Why did political elites have an interest in setting up these costly systems in the absence of electoral incentives to do so? Based on historical evidence for Prussia, France, and Argentina, I argue that episodes of large-scale domestic conflict such as peasant revolts and civil wars led political elites to turn to mass education as a means to prevent future rebellions by instilling values of obedience and respect for authority. The statistical tests for this argument focus on assessing how a legacy of civil war impacts post-war investments in education provision. I exploit the geographic concentration of civil war in mid-nineteenth century Chile, and show that in the aftermath of the 1859 civil war—the causes of which had nothing to do with education provision—the central government made an unprecedented investment in mass schooling, and the expansion was greatest in those provinces that had rebelled against it. I also show the generalizability of this argument in non-parametric difference-in-difference estimates of the impact of civil war using original data on primary education enrollment rates for Latin American and European countries beginning in 1830. Civil wars, I find, led to a 10 percentage point increase in primary school enrollment rates (well above the effect of giving voting rights to the poor). Overall, the paper conceptualizes mass education less as a service for ordinary citizens and more as a tool used by political elites to consolidate power.

Author

• Agustina Paglayan, University of California, San Diego