Revolutions Half-Made: The Politics of Education Expansion in India

• In Event: Scale, status, and expansion: Cultural-historical studies of education and democracy in South Asia

Proposal

The positive relationship between education and political participation has been one of the strongest findings in education and political science and is found at the individual and macro levels (Putnam, 1995, Verba et al 1995). Despite these arguments, a growing body of evidence in political science has shown that the relationship might not perhaps be as strong as previously argued. Findings from Nigeria (Larreguy et al. 2017), Malawi (Croke et al. 2016), and historically (Paglayan 2021) suggest that education can both inculcate anti-democratic values and be promoted by authoritarian leaders as a form of social control.

I advance an alternative argument for these anti-democratic findings rooted not in the content of education, but in the political economy of education expansion. I study the case of education expansion in India to argue that education has often been expanded by elite actors through what Culpepper (2010) calls "quiet" politics, attempting to remove policy from electoral politics. By doing so, policy expansion triggers a backlash among elite groups, and subsequently compromises quality at the expanse of speed and quantity. Together, this helps explain the nature of education provision, with high government investment, low-quality government schooling, and high private school attendance we see in many low- and middle-income countries.

To advance this argument, I begin by tracing qualitatively how education was expanded, showing how policy elites within the Indian bureaucracy and international financial institutions such as the World Bank, Department for International Development, and European Union sought to insulate education policy from political interference. I marshal evidence from 21 semi-structured interviews with policy makers and bureaucrats involved with the design and implementation of education policies in India between 1986 and 2002 within international financial institutions, the Central Government, various state-level governments, and NGOs. To insulate themselves from political pressures, policy-makers created independent bureaucratic agencies outside the purview of traditional lines of accountability with the intention of speeding up the transfer of funding from international financial institutions to the local level, allowing policy makers and implementers to rapidly expand education over a short period of time.

The consequences of this insulation is that by not including social groups in policy formulation and implementation, high-status uppper caste social groups chose to exit from government provided services at the expense of lower caste groups, groups the program was supposed to benefit. I provide evidence on these unintended consequences using the assignment rules of one of the programs the Indian Government implemented in this period, the District Primary Education Programme (or DPEP), loosely translated to Education for All, in 2002 and was part of the impetus for the Right to Education Act (RTE) in 2009.

I use a regression discontinuity design to causally identify the effects of education expansion on local politics and financial expenditure, particularly citizens satisfaction with the quality of education and willingness to invest in education. I use two household panel surveys, the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) and the Additional Rural Income Survey-Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (ARIS-REDS) that tracks individuals over an eighteen year period from 1994 to 2012 and asks a broad range of questions on political behavior and participation.

Together with state-level data on education expenditure, I find that the expansion of education by the Indian state leads to an increase in satisfaction with education. This satisfaction is concentrated among upper caste groups, the groups best positioned to exit from government provided services initially, with null effects for lower caste groups who are then stuck with poor performing government services, starting from an existing high baseline of dissatisfaction. All groups support reduced investment in education at the village-level, preferences that are reflected in actual village-level expenditures. Potentially as a function of unchanged satisfaction with the quality of education at the village level, lower caste groups increase their participation in village-level politics and manage to raise the salience of education within villages, particularly right after education was expanded. This does not translate to greater expenditure on education, however. Villages decrease their expenditure on basic education but increase their expenditure on more targeted educational expenditures such as scholarships. This is matched at higher levels of government, where states that rapidly expanded education also spend less per capita on education than states that did not expand education.

By rooting the expansion of education in the politics of how it was expanded, this paper brings education politics into conversation with a larger literature on welfare expansion across disciplines. Questions about why states privatize services have often relied on institutional roots of policy development (Hacker 2004) or public opinion as separate causal forces (Cammett 2015). In this paper, I argue for the interplay of the two -- new institutions have unintended consequences that shape public opinion and political behavior, creating path dependence and reliance on particular welfare arrangements. By combining the causal role of institutions and public opinion (Steinmo 2015), the paper is able to tease out the unintended consequences and secondary effects of policy reforms causally identified through natural experiments. Through this, the paper joins a tradition in policy feedback (Campbell 2003) and adaptive political economy (Ang 2024) that looks at the mutually constitutive impact of institutional change and public opinion.

This paper also contributes to debates on the effects of education on political participation, adding to a growing literature that suggests we should revisit the law-like assertion that education increases political participation, with more modest claims of taking institutional context in which increasing education takes place. Given the scale of the expansion of education in India, answers from this context should inform how we think about education more broadly. It takes a long-run view of the effects of education, looking at the impacts of the expansion of education nearly twenty years after individuals were granted expanded access to educational opportunities. It also does this through credibly causal identification strategies, allowing us to isolate the effects of education rather than confounders such as wealth.

Author

• Emmerich Davies, University of Michigan