From education to democracy?

The conventional wisdom, since at least the writings of John Dewey (1916), views high levels of educational attainment as a prerequisite for democracy. Education is argued to promote democracy, both because it enables a "culture of democracy" to develop and because it leads to greater pros...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American economic review 2005-05, Vol.95 (2), p.44-49
Main Authors: Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon, Robinson, James A, Yared, Pierre
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic achievement
Age
Autocracy
Bildungsniveau
Correlation
Correlation analysis
Data analysis
Democracy
Democratization
Demokratie
Economic growth
Economic indices
Economics of education
Education
Educational attainment
Empirical evidence
GDP
Gross Domestic Product
Hypotheses
Modernization
Per capita
Political institutions
Political regimes
Political systems
Polities
Population
Population control
Returns to education
School attendance
Standard error
Studies
The Democratic Transition and Economic Growth
Variables
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Summary:The conventional wisdom, since at least the writings of John Dewey (1916), views high levels of educational attainment as a prerequisite for democracy. Education is argued to promote democracy, both because it enables a "culture of democracy" to develop and because it leads to greater prosperity, which is also thought to cause political development. The most celebrated version of this argument is the modernization theory, popularized by Seymour Martin Lipset (1959), which emphasizes the role of education as well as economic growth in promoting political development in general and democracy in particular. Existing literature looks at the cross-sectional correlation between education and democracy rather than at the within variation.
ISSN:0002-8282
1944-7981
DOI:10.1257/000282805774669916