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The Effect of Education on Civic and Political Engagement in Non-Consolidated Democracies: Evidence from Nigeria
Abstract
Developing democracies are experiencing unprecedented increases in primary and secondary schooling. To identify education's long-run political effects, we utilize a difference-in-differences design that leverages variation across local government areas and gender in the intensity of Nigeria's 1976 Universal Primary Education reform—one of Africa's largest ever educational expansions—to instrument for education. We find large increases in basic civic and political engagement: better educated citizens are more attentive to politics, more likely to vote, and more involved in community associations. The effects are largest among minority groups and in fractionalized areas, without increasing support for political violence or own-group identification. JEL: D72, I25.
... We argue that democratic institutional strength is a key variable moderating the effect of education on political participation. Our logic builds upon the variation in causal evidence from recent scholarship in developing countries: while education had a positive effect on education in nascent democracies (Wantchekon et al., 2015;Larreguy and Marshall, 2017), in more stable democracies there were null effects (Friedman et al., 2016;Parinduri, 2019) and in authoritarian contexts, negative effects (Croke et al., 2016). This variation suggests that the effect of education on participation may depend on the country's regime type. ...
... We first identify effects on an individual's educational attainment using a difference-in-differences (DiD) strategy that exploits (1) subnational variation in the intensity of the school reform and (2) whether an individual's age during the reform allowed them to benefit from it. Following Larreguy and Marshall (2017), we operationalize treatment intensity as the middle school completion rates of male and female birth cohorts that completed their education just prior to the reform within each communauté rurale (CR), the lowest administrative unit above the village level. Reforms should have a disproportionately greater effect in CRs with lowest levels of education-and only among those who are young enough to benefit from the reforms. ...
... Articles using alternative identification strategies generally also find no significant effect of education on voter turnout in the United States, Sweden, and Norwayeither in the short or long run (Tenn, 2007;Berinsky and Lenz, 2011;Pelkonen, 2012;Ahlskog, 2021). 1 Yet, there is strong evidence that education positively affects political participation through formal channels in developing contexts. Larreguy and Marshall (2017) find that education increased political participation in Nigeria: more educated citizens are more likely to be interested in and informed about politics, to contact local government officials, to participate in community associations and meetings, and to vote in elections. Formal education in Mali (Bleck, 2015) and nonformal education in Senegal (Kuenzi, 2006) have also increased political knowledge and participation. ...
We argue that education's effect on political participation in developing democracies depends on the strength of democratic institutions. Education increases awareness of, and interest in, politics, which help citizens to prevent democratic erosion through increased political participation. We examine Senegal, a stable but developing democracy where presidential over-reach threatened to weaken democracy. For causal identification, we use a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits variation in the intensity of a major school reform and citizens’ ages during reform implementation. Results indicate that schooling increases interest in politics and greater support for democratic institutions—but no increased political participation in the aggregate. Education increases political participation primarily when democracy is threatened, when support for democratic institutions among educated individuals is also greater.
... While the field of political particiation is quite rich in quasi-experimental studies, far less work has included authoritarian contexts. Quasi-experimental studies outside of Western democracies have found that education negatively impacts political participation in competitive-authoritarian Zimbabwe (Croke et al., 2016); it positively affects political concern and voting in authoritarian Vietnam (Dang, 2019); and it increases political engagement in the nonconsolidated democracy of Nigeria (Larreguy and Marshall, 2017). There is, however, no effect of education on democratic attitudes in Kenya (Friedman et al., 2016); and curriculum reform in China is argued to lead to greater ideological convergence with the ruling regime in China (Cantoni et al., 2017). ...
... These characteristics have been argued to confound the relationship between education and voting (Berinsky and Lenz, 2011;Kam and Palmer, 2008) as well as education and social trust . There is, however, also a set of studies with strong research designs that supports a positive effect of education on political participation in consolidated democracies (Dee, 2004;Milligan et al., 2004;Sondheimer and Green, 2010) and nonconsolidated democracies (Larreguy and Marshall, 2017) as well as in authoritarian states (Dang, 2019). Croke et al. (2016) exploit an educational reform in Zimbabwe and find that increased education is negatively connected to political participation but has positive effects on the support of democratic institutions. ...
... The findings of this study diverge in several ways from what has been found in recent contributions, and thus have important implications for future research. The positive effect of authoritarian education on support for democracy and political interest found by quasi-experimental studies in single countries (Croke et al., 2016;Dang, 2019;Larreguy and Marshall, 2017) does not generalize to this set of thirteen European countries. Our results are also considerably less positive about the potential for education to generally promote support for democracy than are recent large cross-country comparative studies (Chong and Gradstein, 2015;Diwan and Vartanova, 2020). ...
Political science has long viewed education as an instrumental factor in developing support for democracy and beneficial for democratization. However, governments, both democratic and authoritarian, have substantial control over the curriculum and develop education institutions with the specific aim to instill in students the norms and values that underpin the regime. With this in mind, this study asks, does the effect of education vary by the political regime in which education was undertaken? We use a quasi-experimental approach exploiting European compulsory schooling reforms, implemented under both democratic and authoritarian regimes, to answer this question. We find that education has no effect on principle and functional support for democracy, but that education’s effect on satisfaction with democracy is conditional on regime type. For those educated under a democratic regime, education led to greater satisfaction with democracy, whereas those educated under an authoritarian regime became less satisfied with democracy.
... Second, while numerous studies in the same topic have conducted in the countries having strongly institutionalized democracies, there have been limited studies devoted to explore the same research question in the countries with non-consolidated democracies or even autocracies (Levitsky and Murillo 2009;Croke et al. 2016;Larreguy and Marshall 2017). This study provides evidence on the causal impact of education on political outcomes in a Marxist-Leninist regime relying on a singular political system, a very different political institution in the world. ...
... In particular, Beninese citizens who were fully exposed to this formal schooling establishment, and their next generations as well, are significantly more likely to become political activists or members of political parties compared to those who were not affected by the colonial educational establishment. Meanwhile, Larreguy and Marshall (2017) exploit the 1976 universal primary education policy as a source of exogenous changes in schooling attainment to estimate the causal effect of education on political outcomes in Nigeria, a tenuously institutionalized democracy in Africa. They find that education causes increases in citizens' political concern, voting as well as the interaction with local authorities and the participation in community activities as well. ...
... For education, studies have verified a seemingly strong assumption that education influences political participation (Larreguy & Marshall, 2017;Arnot et al., 2009). However, Berinsky andLenz (2011), McIntosh, Hart andYouniss (2007), and Finkel and Ernst (2005) showed that when other variables (social factors such as family political discussion and the student's own level of media exposure and prior political interest) are taken into account, civic education had weaker attitudinal and skill than knowledge effect. ...
... The finding on education contradicts the findings of Croke et al. (2016) and supports the findings of Larreguy and Marshall (2017) and Arnot et al. (2009), as discussed in the literature review section above. Our result showed that individuals with higher education are more involved in politics than those with secondary education, who are in turn more involved than participants with only primary education. ...
This study proposed a reframing of Sociopolitical Development Theory (SDT) towards contextualising civic engagement (specifically political participation and human rights activism) in emerging democracies like Nigeria. The modified theory developed from the application of SDT lenses on the analysis of the influence of five sociodemographic factors on 372 participants' civic engagement report. Results showed significant variations across groups-male participants and individuals who have higher education and income were more likely to participate in politics, while male participants and individuals who have higher income were more likely to engage in human rights activism. Human rights activism was also more likely to be engaged in by emerging adults and individuals with secondary education. Generally, based on the SDT, low sociopolitical awareness were found. Analyses of these patterns led to the contextualised SDT that better explained our findings. Using the modified SDT lenses, high sociopolitical awareness with low sociopolitical (civic) action were found, although variations across sociodemographic factors remained consistent with SDT. The implications of these results were discussed in terms of the importance of understanding the nuances of civic engagement in diverse democracies and the relevance of contextualising imported theories. Suggestions for increasing civic engagement towards stronger democracies were also advanced.
... This paper uses micro-census data harmonized by IPUMS-International to evaluate the impacts of FPE on women's education, employment and fertility. For identification, I exploit variation in year and location of birth to construct a differences-in-differences approach à la Duflo (2001) and Larreguy and Marshall (2017). Comparing the outcomes of eligible cohorts with those of individuals who were too old to attend primary school in the year that the policy was implemented provides variation pre-and post-reform. ...
... Intuitively, the lower this is, the more the district's population might benefit from school fee elimination. This treatment intensity variable is similar to the one constructed in the evaluation of the Nigerian UPE reform by Larreguy and Marshall (2017). ...
The first chapter of this thesis leverages micro data from 179 reproductive health surveys to shed light on a macro puzzle: fertility rates are exceptionally high in sub-Saharan Africa conditional on GDP per capita. The paper first establishes an important empirical fact: the relationship between wealth and desired fertility is, on average, steeper in sub-Saharan Africa. It then explores the links to the relative scarcity of salaried employment opportunities in these countries. A quantity-quality trade-off model of fertility choice featuring a fixed human capital requirement for entry into salaried employment predicts that a feedback loop can arise, where poorer families get stuck in a high fertility - informal occupation equilibrium in which they also under-invest in their children’s education. Rich micro data assembled from reproductive health surveys, censuses and household expenditure surveys provide empirical support for the model’s key assumptions and predictions. The findings suggest that differences in occupational choice sets across the income distribution represent an important driver of sub-Saharan Africa’s exceptional fertility trend. The second chapter exploits variation in exposure to the reform across birth cohorts and locations to evaluate the impacts of primary school fee abolition on female education, employment and fertility outcomes in Malawi, Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania. The findings suggest that fee elimination improved educational attainment among cohorts most exposed to the reform: the effects range from a 5% increase in years of schooling in Malawi to a 17% increase in Ghana. The probability of completing primary school also increased in Tanzania, Ghana and Uganda, but not Malawi, for which I find a small but negative effect. The FPE reform is also associated with an increase in employment and a reduction in fertility. In Malawi, the increase in women’s labor market participation is concentrated in the education sector, with a small share of women shifting away from agriculture. In Tanzania, employment effects are driven by increased participation in the education sector and self-employed retail. In Ghana and Uganda, the share of women engaging in self-employed non-agricultural activities increases. The employment effects are largest in Ghana, where they are driven by entry into self-employed retail, manufacturing and food/accommodation services. Correlational evidence suggests that heterogeneity in policy impact may be partly 2 attributable to differences in schooling productivity before the reform and in how the governments accommodated the enrolment increase. The third chapter is joint work that leverages a randomized experiment to study the diffusion of the impacts of an agronomy training program through the social and geographic networks of coffee farmers in Rwanda. We find no evidence of diffusion through geographic networks or from the treatment group to the control group. Our results suggest a reinforcement of treatment effects within the treatment group, concentrated around leaf health improvements. This is driven by farmers who attended the training sessions with people to whom they already had a social connection at baseline. The program also caused a re-sorting of social networks: we find that both treatment and control group households increased social links to individuals trained in their village.
... Empirical studies have revealed a positive association between education and civic engagement (Nie et al., 1996;Verba et al., 1995). Moreover, it has been reported in a study that better-educated citizens were more likely to engage in civic and political activities (Larreguy & Marshall, 2017). However, in an authoritarian regime, it was found that the more people were educated, the more they tended to disengage from civic and political activities (Croke et al., 2016), which was taken as a silent means to express their protest against the regime. ...
... These findings align with prior studies that found a positive association between education and civic engagement (Barrios, 2017;Klesner, 2007). High levels of education were correlated with increased political and community participation in Nigeria (Larreguy & Marshall, 2017). Egerton (2002) reported having found a moderate effect of high education on civic engagement using British panel data. ...
The Indonesian population is aging very rapidly and as the number of old people increases, the number of retirees increases as well. Many scholars have argued the benefits of civic engagement in old age, but there is lack of empirical evidence of the factors associated with civic engagement in Indonesia. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between education levels, retirement status, and civic engagement among older adults in Indonesia. The study used data from the fifth wave of the Indonesia Family and Life Survey which was held in late 2014 and early 2015. The study included participants aged 56 years and older, the mandatory age for retirement in 2014 in Indonesia. Multiple regression was modelled for data analysis. The main results revealed that those who completed junior and senior high school and high education exhibited more civic engagement than those who completed only primary education. Moreover, the study found that those who were retired were less engaged in civic activities than those still in labor force. These relationships held true even after controlling for gender, age, marital status, personality traits, religiosity, and self-rated health variables. To strengthen democracy and growth, education needs to be re-emphasized and there is need for further investigation concerning retirement and civic engagement in Indonesia.
... Six of the seven datasets included a district or region of birth variable, which uses as a proxy for the district or region where the individual went to primary school. In the Nigeria surveys, however, no information on the location of birth of sampled individuals was available, so this paper follows Larreguy and Marshall [16] and use current Local Government Authority (LGA) -a geographical unit similar to that of district in the other countries -as a proxy for LGA od birth. ...
... Throughout the analysis, this paper excludes the 'partially treated' cohorts, i.e. individuals older than the official age of entry into primary school but young enough at the time of the reform to have still been enrolled in primary school. The variable is constructed using pre-reform education levels in individuals' district of birth, similarly to Larreguy and Marshall [16]. This variable is equal to 1 for individuals born in districts where the proportion of people having completed primary school is below the national median primary school completion rate before the reform. ...
... 10 Country studies focusing on developing countries have devised identification methods to go around this problem, variously utilizing natural experiments (Friedman, Kremer, Miguel, and Thornton 2013), experimental methods (Algan et al., 2013), or when using observational data, exploiting compulsory schooling reforms to instrument for exogenous changes in the education system (Huang, 2015, Dang 2017, Wantchekon et al., 2015Larreguy and Marshall, 2016;Croke et al., 2016). 11 Some autocratic regimes possess some amount of legitimacy because they deliver results (Gilley, 2006). ...
... In selecting out dependent variables, our aim is to choose variables similar to those used in the literature, as reviewed in the previous section. To describe political behavior, we focus, like much of the literature, on variables that measure the extent of political participation, including of voting behavior (eg Coke et al., 2016, Larreguy andMarshall, 2016;Kuenzi, 2006;Wantchekon et al., 2015, Friedman et al., 2013. The variables that describe political beliefs include attachment to democracy and respect for authority (similar to variables in Cantoni et al., 2017;Wang, 2016, Friedman et al., 2013. ...
Do states manage to build education systems that produce students with political values they uphold? We test the indoctrination hypothesis using World Value Survey data spanning 96 countries. We devise an empirical strategy that can identify the effects of education on political values by using information about the political regime under which individuals live, and regimes under which they got educated. Our results suggest that state indoctrination is at work. For example, we find that higher education increases voting behavior by at least 45 percent more for cohorts that have studied in a democratic rather than an autocratic country.
... A growing literature in the social sciences has highlighted the necessity of increased political engagement and large scale population buy in in democratic contexts to improve the implementation and enforcement of development policy (Larreguy and Marshall, 2017;Casey, Glennerster, and Miguel, 2012;Gugerty and Kremer, 2008). Where low levels of trust in institutions and social capital exist, individuals are less likely to engage in the community building, investment and participation at the scale needed to cause policy change, particularly in nascent democracies (Francois and Zabojnik, 2005;Warren, 1999;Dearmon and Grier, 2009;Woolcock and Narayan, 2000;Fukuyama, 1995;Bratton and Van de Walle, 1997). ...
... Our measures of trust include respondents' reported trust in the president, police, courts, NEC, traditional leaders, local government officials, national vs independent broadcast, tax officials, their own relatives and neighbors. We adapt Larreguy and Marshall (2017) and measure civic engagement using respondents' reports of how often they often they participated in community meetings in the past year, and political engagement using respondent' reports of whether they voted in the previous election, how often they listen to the news (on radio, tv, in newspapers or on the internet), participated in an election rally, participated in a protest march or political demonstration in the past year and whether they supported democracy, and could name their VP or local government representative. To understand the economic conditions faced by the respondents, we also examine the level of food poverty, the level of education of the respondent and the respondents reported access to schools, police stations, sewage systems, health facilities, piped water and electricity. ...
Africa is often referred to as the world's youngest continent, with 60% of its population below the age of 25. How do these young citizens understand the "social contract" and view their roles in society, particularly in relation to their governments and interactions with other citizens? And what are the links between trust in government institutions and broader civic and political engagement? We examine patterns and trends in youth's trust in government and civic and political engagement in sub-Saharan Africa using data from the Afrobarometer surveys from 1999 to 2014. We examine heterogeneity in results by gender. We find that youth score much lower on most measures of trust and civic and political engagement except trust in courts and national broadcasting, where youth score higher than older cohorts. Youth are more likely to be unemployed and report fearing election violence than older cohorts. They are also much less likely to vote, report support for democracy and participate in community decision making than older cohorts. While they are less likely to practice active political engagement, youth are more likely than older cohorts to consume news from major media sources, including TV, newspaper and the internet. We find significant gaps in female civic and political engagement, with women less likely than their male counterparts to vote, and participate in electoral rallies. Young women partly reverse this trend, being slightly more likely to vote, more likely to support democracy and more likely to participate in community decision making than their male counterparts. The results suggest that youth are much less likely to view traditionally democratic processes as effective means of signaling preferences to their government leaders. However, we document strong negative correlations between increased support for democracy and trust in the president and political demonstration. We also document significant positive correlations between voting, civic engagement, support for democracy and trust in government institutions. The results provide a foundation for framing policy aimed at increasing civic and political engagement through democratic institutions among youth and women in African countries.
... Finally, our study relates to the extended literature on causal effects of the change in the compulsory schooling law on different outcome variables such as marriage market outcomes (Hener and Wilson, 2018), labor market outcomes (Angrist and Krueger, 1991;Aydemir and Kırdar, 2013;Mocan, 2014;Torun, 2018), child's educational outcomes, drop-out decisions (Oreopoulos, 2006;Oreopoulos, 2007;Caner, Guven, Okten and Sakalli, 2016), civic and political behavior outcomes (Dee, 2004;Milligan, Moretti and Oreopoulos, 2004;Larreguy and Marshall, 2017;, health outcomes (Cesur, Dursun, and Mocan, 2018;Kırdar, Dayıoğlu, andKoç, 2018, subjective well-being (Dursun andCesur, 2016) and domestic violence outcomes (Erten and Keskin, 2018;Abdurahimov and Akyol, 2018). We contribute to this growing literature by offering the first study to examine the effects of education on prosocial behavior by using a change in compulsory schooling law as an instrument. ...
... See,Angrist and Krueger (1991),Oreopoulos (2006),Oreopoulos (2007),Dee (2004),Milligan, Moretti and Oreopoulos (2004),Larreguy and Marshall (2017),Hener and Wilson (2018) for an example of earlier and more recent studies that uses compulsory schooling reform as an instrument. ...
We use the extension of compulsory education from five to eight years in Turkey as an instrument for educational attainment to investigate the causal effects of education on prosocial behavior by utilizing Turkish Time Use Survey data. Ours is the first paper that investigates the causal effect of education on volunteering. We find that the education reform increased the education levels significantly, and increased education had a causal negative and significant impact on prosocial behavior of men as time spent in volunteering and helping others decreased. We also investigate the causal channels through which education decreases prosocial behavior. We find that schooling increased the likelihood of earning higher wages and work hours, which suggests that men substituted hours worked for time spent in prosocial activity as a result of an exogenous increase in their education levels. Our findings also suggest that education might have enhanced individualism and self-centrism as we find that time spent in leisure and sport activity increased. We do not find any significant effects of education on female prosocial behavior in Turkey, where female labor force participation rate at 32 percent has remained low and stagnant across the years.
... Finally, our study relates to the extended literature on causal effects of the change in the compulsory schooling law on different outcome variables such as marriage market outcomes (Hener and Wilson, 2018), labor market outcomes (Angrist and Krueger, 1991;Aydemir and Kırdar, 2013;Mocan, 2014;Torun, 2018), child's educational outcomes, drop-out decisions (Oreopoulos, 2006;Oreopoulos, 2007;Caner, Guven, Okten and Sakalli, 2016), civic and political behavior outcomes (Dee, 2004;Milligan, Moretti and Oreopoulos, 2004;Larreguy and Marshall, 2017;, health outcomes (Cesur, Dursun, and Mocan, 2018;Kırdar, Dayıoğlu, and Koç, 2018, subjective well-being ( Dursun and Cesur, 2016) and domestic violence outcomes (Erten and Keskin, 2018;Abdurahimov and Akyol, 2018). We contribute to this growing literature by offering the first study to examine the effects of education on prosocial behavior by using a change in compulsory schooling law as an instrument. ...
... See, Angrist and Krueger (1991), Oreopoulos (2006), Oreopoulos (2007), Dee (2004), Milligan, Moretti and Oreopoulos (2004), Larreguy and Marshall (2017), Hener and Wilson (2018) for an example of earlier and more recent studies that uses compulsory schooling reform as an instrument. ...
We use the extension of compulsory education from five to eight years in Turkey as an instrument for educational attainment to investigate the causal effects of education on prosocial behavior by utilizing Turkish Time Use Survey data. Ours is the first paper that investigates the causal effect of education on volunteering. We find that the education reform increased the education levels significantly, and increased education had a causal negative and significant impact on prosocial behavior of men as time spent in volunteering and helping others decreased. We also investigate the causal channels through which education decreases prosocial behavior. We find that schooling increased the likelihood of earning higher wages and work hours, which suggests that men substituted hours worked for time spent in prosocial activity as a result of an exogenous increase in their education levels. Our findings also suggest that education might have enhanced individualism and self-centrism as we find that time spent in leisure and sport activity increased. We do not find any significant effects of education on female prosocial behavior in Turkey, where female labor force participation rate at 32 percent has remained low and stagnant across the years.
... Indeed, recent research shows a clear relationship between the expansion of education and long-run political participation. 29 In sum, capitalist development generates independent sources of economic and social power, dispersing resources away from the state and making it harder for leaders to monopolize political control. Higher incomes, wealthier private sectors, larger middle and working classes, and bigger cities generate what might be called countervailing societal power, which is critical to both achieving and sustaining democracy. ...
Against widespread perceptions, the authors argue that democracy has proven remarkably resilient in the twenty-first century. Fears of a "reverse wave" or a global "authoritarian resurgence" have yet to be borne out. The vast majority of "third wave" democracies—those that adopted democratic institutions between 1975 and 2000—have long outlived the favorable global conditions that enabled their creation. The authors attribute the resilience of third-wave democracies after the demise of the liberal West's post–Cold War hegemony to economic development and urbanization, and also to the difficulty of consolidating and sustaining an emergent authoritarian regime under competitive political conditions.
... Accordingly, education, when properly conducted, could increase political engagement (Galston 2001). This is further elaborated by the argument that citizens who are highly educated are more likely to pay attention to issues of politics, are more inclined to vote, and with a greater likelihood to be involved in community associations (Larreguy & Marshall 2017). ...
... Historically, education has led to varied outcomes. Consistent with research in democratization, the trend seems to reflect that increasing education leads to increased political participation (Lipset, 1959;Lerner, 1958;Benavot, 1996 (Cavaillé and Marshall, 2017) and increasingly educated citizens are more likely to be politically active in Nigeria -especially when they are part of minority groups (Larreguy and Marshall, 2017). ...
Past literature in democratization, nationalism, and autocratic regime maintenance illustrate how education invites both risk and reward for autocratic states.
Education is simultaneously linked with pro-democratic attitudes, political disengagement, and autocratic failure. At the same time, autocrats are predicted to be
hesitant towards investing in disenfranchised populations. However, education has
also been found to bolster national loyalty and identity, human capital, and longterm development. Nor is the real-world variation clear, autocratic states display
significant variation in educational investment and attainment in addition to varied
relationships between education and political outcomes. I argue that education can
sustain or compromise autocratic stability depending on two factors: the ethnic composition of the state and the extent to which the state uses propaganda in schools.
Education does not have a uniform effect. Education will not instill similarly prodemocratic attitudes or identity affiliations across a diverse population, even if the
education “treatment” is constant. At the state level, similar educational policies
and initiatives across autocratic states can have opposite outcomes, jeopardizing or
strengthening autocratic stability. Similarly, at the individual level, increased education can lead to individuals becoming more or less attached to the national identity.
My dissertation presents three papers to investigate the factors leading to differences
in this real-world variation.
... The intuitions underlying these theoretical relationships are sound and logical. Moreover, the positive nexus between governance and education is consistent with the attendant literature (Stasavage 2005a(Stasavage , 2005bMani and Mukand 2007;Harding and Stasavage 2014;Kosack 2012;Croke et al. 2016;Larreguy and Marshall 2017;Harding 2019). Hence, while we are conscious of the risks of doing measurement without an established theoretical framework, we also strongly argue that applied econometrics that is motivated by sound intuition is a useful scientific activity. ...
This paper examines the governance-"education quality" nexus in a panel of 49 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2000-2012. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Quantile regression (QR) are employed as estimation strategies. The following findings are established. First, from the OLS, governance variables are negatively correlated with poor education quality. Second, with regards to QR, about half of the governance dynamics are not significantly correlated with poor education quality in the lowest quantile of poor education quality. With the exception of corruption-control, the other governance dynamics are negatively correlated with poor education quality in a non-monotonic pattern.
... Perlman Robinson and Winthrop's (2016) study has been particularly influential with donors and large multilateral organisations in detailing a stress on local contextual need, cost effectiveness, the importance of teachers, alliances with civil society, national and international champions in government, a supportive policy environment, long-term and flexible funding, and leveraging change through technology and cultures of monitoring, evaluation, and research. However, national and some international studies often emphasise developing citizenship or a sense of inclusion as integral to quality education (Umar, Saidu, & Azare, 2015;Larreguy & Marshall, 2017). Whether or not PPPs in education deliver on quality has been an area of controversy with two literature reviews indicating there is too little research to draw conclusions on what happens inside particular PPP arrangements, and suggesting the claims around what PPPs can achieve for quality need careful scrutiny (Languille, 2017;Verger, Fontdevila, & Zancajo, 2017). ...
... For society, first, education generates material benefits by increasing productivity, boosting economic growth, and promoting poverty reduction and long-term development [7][8][9]. Second, education brings non-material benefits to social development through increasing social mobility, citizen participation, better institutional provision, and social cohesion [10,11]. Hence, improving the level of individual education is crucial to sustainable development, both for individuals and society. ...
Educational investment of families in their children is related to the sustainable development of both individuals and society. This paper uses data from China Family Panel Studies to study the impact of rural parents’ internal migration on education investment in left-behind children in China. The results show that parental internal migration has a significant negative impact on educational investment in left-behind children. The results persisted after further treatment for endogeneity and multiple robustness tests. Mechanism analysis shows that while increasing the family income, rural to urban migration reduces parents’ recognition of children’s education, thus reducing the family’s investment in left-behind children’s education. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the negative impact of both parents’ going out was the largest, followed by only the father going out, while only the mother going out was no longer significant. The negative effect of inter-provincial out-going is greater than that of intra-provincial out-going. Girls were negatively affected more than boys; middle school students were more affected than primary school students. Our findings suggest it is necessary to further eliminate labor market discrimination caused by household registration and improve educational quality of rural public schools. The lessons learned from China are valuable for other developing countries with large numbers of rural citizens migrating to cities.
... Le taux d'analphabétisme: il se définit comme la proportion de la population analphabète dans la population totale de la région. L'alphabétisme augmente l'engagement civique des citoyens (Larreguy et Marshall, 2017). Il intègre chez les personnes une prédisposition au respect de mesures édictées par la législation. ...
La recherche de l’équilibre entre offre et demande publique de santé est depuis le début des années soixante, avec la théorie du capital humain, une préoccupation des économistes et des autorités publiques. Cette situation est d’autant plus prégnante que cet équilibre est instable vue les défis sanitaires qui gonflent la demande et la rareté des ressources financières qui diminue l’offre, surtout dans le contexte des pays en développement comme le Niger. L’objectif de ce document est de contribuer à lutter efficacement contre le Covid-19 au Niger. Sur la base des caractéristiques démo-économiques, issues des données du recensement général de la population (2012) et de l’enquête sur les conditions de vie des ménages et de l’agriculture (ECVMA, 2014), des indices de propagation ont permis d’identifier que les régions de Tillabéri, Maradi et Dosso sont respectivement les plus exposées à la propagation du Covid-19. Leur risque élevé s’explique surtout par la faible prévention de la pandémie. Sachant que Niamey est l’épicentre du Covid-19, nos résultats montrent qu’il est indispensable de limiter les déplacements de la population de Niamey vers les autres régions du pays, ce qui corrobore l’état d’urgence sanitaire de Niamey. En outre, les modèles épidémiologiques utilisés permettent de prévoir quotidiennement et par région le nombre de personnes potentiellement infectées du Covid-19, ainsi que la fourchette des coûts financiers en cas de prise en charge partielle ou totale. Toutefois, comme l’analyse se fonde sur le fait qu’une personne atteinte du Covid-19 n’affecte que les membres de son ménage, il est à craindre le pire dans un contexte de contact quotidien inter-ménages, voire inter-régions, ce qui milite en faveur du confinement total de la population, malgré ses coûts multiformes, pour une riposte sanitaire adéquate.
Mots clés: Covid-19, contact endogène, contact exogène, riposte sanitaire, Niger.
... Lindgren et al. (2019) also find that a Swedish education reform which increased years of education did not boost overall voting rates, but it did increase participation for students from families in the lowest quartile of socioeconomic status. A related literature explores the connection between education and civic participation in the developing world (Wantchekon et al., 2015;Friedman et al., 2016;Croke et al., 2016;Larreguy and Marshall, 2017) and for the most part, finds that education increases voting and related political engagement. But Croke et al. (2016) show that in the context of an authoritarian regime, education actually decreases voting as a form of protest, or "deliberate disengagement." ...
... In practice, it is common to apply the DID method with additional pre-treatment periods. 1 However, in contrast to the basic two-time-period case, there are a number of different ways to analyze the DID design with multiple pre-treatment periods. One popular approach is to apply the two-way fixed effects regression to the entire time periods and supplement it with various robustness checks (e.g., Dube, Dube and García-Ponce, 2013;Truex, 2014;Hall, 2016;Larreguy and Marshall, 2017). Another is to stick with the twotime-period DID and limit the use of additional pre-treatment periods only to the assessment of pre-treatment trends (e.g., Ladd and Lenz, 2009;Bechtel and Hainmueller, 2011;Bullock and Clinton, 2011;Keele and Minozzi, 2013;Garfias, 2018). ...
While difference-in-differences (DID) was originally developed with one pre- and one post-treatment periods, data from additional pre-treatment periods is often available. How can researchers improve the DID design with such multiple pre-treatment periods under what conditions? We first use potential outcomes to clarify three benefits of multiple pre-treatment periods: (1) assessing the parallel trends assumption, (2) improving estimation accuracy, and (3) allowing for a more flexible parallel trends assumption. We then propose a new estimator, double DID, which combines all the benefits through the generalized method of moments and contains the two-way fixed effects regression as a special case. In a wide range of applications where several pre-treatment periods are available, the double DID improves upon the standard DID both in terms of identification and estimation accuracy. We also generalize the double DID to the staggered adoption design where different units can receive the treatment in different time periods. We illustrate the proposed method with two empirical applications, covering both the basic DID and staggered adoption designs. We offer an open-source R package that implements the proposed methodologies.
... Kuenzi and Lambright (2011) conducted a comparison of 10 African countries, wherein they found that educated African citizens are more likely to vote than the less educated ones. Others have found similar findings in Kenya (Finkel et al., 2012), Nigeria (Larreguy & Marshall, 2017), and South Africa (Finkel, 2002). However, some have found no positive linkage between education and political engagement (Croke et al., 2016;Gordon et al., 2019). ...
Social media platforms have created new opportunities for political engagement. This has brought about a rich body of literature on the relationship between the two. However, the impact of social media on redressing or augmenting gender inequality in engagement remains underexplored. This cross-national comparative study investigates the role of social media news use in influencing gender inequality in online political engagement across three Sub-Saharan African nations: Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. An analysis of survey data suggests that there exists a gender divide in online political engagement in the three countries. Furthermore, the informational use of social media increases the likelihood of online political engagement. Still, social media news use exacerbates gender-driven engagement inequality. Finally, education reinforces the role of social media in engagement inequality such that the gender divide in online political engagement is found to be most significant among the higher than lower educated groups. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.
... This finding is inconsistent with other studies that have looked at the link between educational level and psychological distress in Uganda (16) and Africa (17). We may also speculate that since well-educated people have found to be more involved in politics (18), they more easily become political targets of violence (political affiliation was not monitored) or that better educated are more easily startled by violence. On the other hand, it may also be that the somewhat complex vocabulary used in the distress scales was more easily understood by the well-educated patients. ...
Introduction: The International Committee of the Red Cross runs an increasing number of mental health and psychosocial programmes integrated into health facilities in conflict settings across Africa. This study looks at changes in symptoms of psychological distress and impaired functioning among patients supported through such programmes.
Material and Methods: Between January and December 2019, 5,527 victims of violence received mental health and psychosocial support in 29 health facilities in Burundi, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Nigeria and South Sudan. Symptoms of psychological distress (IES-R or DASS21) and daily functioning (ICRC scale) were assessed before and after the intervention. Logistical regression models were used to measure associations between these symptoms and the other variables.
Results: Factors associated with high distress prior to receiving support included age (peaking at 45–54 years), intervening within three months, rape, caretaker neglect, internal displacement, secondary education level and referral pathway. Anxiety levels in particular were higher among victims of violence committed by unknown civilians, the military or armed groups. Low functioning was associated with divorce, grief and violence committed by the military or armed groups. Following the intervention, the vast majority of patients reported reduced psychological distress (97.25% for IES-R and 99.11% for DASS21) and improved daily functioning (93.58%). A linear trend was found between number of individual sessions and reduction in symptoms of distress. Financial losses were associated with less reduction in symptoms of depression and stress.
Discussion: To further address the mental health and psychosocial needs of victims of violence, intervening quickly and increasing the number of individual sessions per patient is crucial. This requires proximity—being in the right place at the right time—which is challenging when working in stable health structures. Symptoms of depression should not be overlooked, and financial losses must be addressed in order to holistically meet the needs of victims of violence.
... Another possibility is that an independent class cleavage could be genuinely emerging, overarching existing ethnic, religious, or regional identities. Educational expansion has been associated with higher political mobilization and electoral turnout among those who most benefited from it, especially among ethnic minorities, which suggests that development has indeed become a political object (Larreguy and Marshall 2017). As noted by Ayo Obe, although "it is common to hear the lament that the two parties are 'just the same,' ...
This paper draws on political attitudes surveys to document the evolution of political cleavages in Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal, four African countries that have held regular multi-party elections in the past two decades. We discuss how colonialism, the politicization of ethnic identities, and the structure of social inequalities have differentially shaped party politics in these countries. Ethnic cleavages are tightly linked to ethnic inequalities, and are highest in Nigeria, at intermediate levels in Ghana, and lowest in Botswana and Senegal. We find evidence of strong educational and rural-urban divides, which cannot be explained by ethnic or regional affiliations. Our results suggest that in these four countries, electoral politics are not only explained by patronage, valence, or leader effects, but also clearly have a socioeconomic dimension. At a time when class cleavages have partly collapsed in old Western democracies, these African democracies could well be moving towards class-based party systems.
... The intuitions underlying these theoretical relationships are sound and logical. Moreover, the positive nexus between governance and education is consistent with the attendant literature (Stasavage 2005a(Stasavage , 2005bMani and Mukand 2007;Harding and Stasavage 2014;Kosack 2012;Croke et al. 2016;Larreguy and Marshall 2017;Harding 2019). Hence, while we are conscious of the risks of doing measurement without an established theoretical framework, we also strongly argue that applied econometrics that is motivated by sound intuition is a useful scientific activity. ...
This paper examines the governance-"education quality" nexus in a panel of 49 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2000-2012. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Quantile regression (QR) are employed as estimation strategies. The following findings are established. First, from the OLS, governance variables are negatively correlated with poor education quality. Second, with regards to QR, about half of the governance dynamics are not significantly correlated with poor education quality in the lowest quantile of poor education quality. With the exception of corruption-control, the other governance dynamics are negatively correlated with poor education quality in a non-monotonic pattern.
... Most citizens have basic information on the foundations of civic action but do not participate because they consider these actions insufficient, or in some cases, futile. Highly reflective individuals are not necessarily becoming more engaged citizensthey might also become skeptical, critical, and disengaged [166,167,168]. Individuals are not equally receptive to the same sessions of civic education and might consider this education as neocolonial or inculcating foreign values altogether [169,170,171,172,173,174]. For example, the university classes on civic engagement and democracy promotion 3 currently organized in selected Ukrainian universities are perceived by some students as a mere credit requirement. ...
What drives civic engagement in weak democracies? What are the psychological processes responsible for overcoming post-authoritarian learned helplessness? This dissertation argues that in non-Western political contexts, traditional psychological predictors of individual engagement in civic affairs---openness to experience, high self-efficacy, and low political skepticism---do not align with previously established Western patterns. Building on the results of a large-scale field experiment on a demographically diverse sample of 1,381 respondents, as well as multi-year ethnographic observation of community engagement in Ukraine, this dissertation demonstrates that perceived self-efficacy and collective efficacy improve respondents’ interest in civic engagement while suppressing their interest in running for office.
In the first chapter, I explore what factors prompt citizens’ interest in joining an electoral commission, supporting a recycling campaign, establishing a civic council, and leading a homeowners’ association. Using original experimental data, I demonstrate that individual empowerment constitutes a sufficient condition for civic engagement. Moreover, contrary to most theoretical expectations, the effects of individual empowerment on involvement in local civic activities are comparable to the effects produced by civic education. This study represents one of the first experimental contributions to support the theory of democratic learning and shows that citizens benefit from democracy by practicing it and trying various civic activities rather than by learning democratic values through civic education and top-down democracy promotion.
In the second chapter, I study the effects of personality traits on policy priorities and ideological preferences of Ukrainians. Previous research suggests that personality affects political attitudes by predisposing people to certain policies. Contrary to these findings, this chapter shows that personality predicts individual response to the revision of the status quo rather than preference for specific policies. I illustrate this logic by addressing one of the most counterintuitive associations between personality traits and political attitudes---the link between openness to experience and conservatism in Eastern Europe. Combining the results of open-ended coding and bootstrapped regression models, the analysis shows that openness to experience predicts both social liberalism and social conservatism. I build upon these findings to address the existing gaps in the personality theory of ideology by suggesting that those open to experience are, on average, more responsive to any policy suggestion that revises the status quo.
In the final chapter, I examine the problem of nascent political ambition in weak democratic states. Building on the results of my original field experiment, I show that higher efficacy discourages political engagement in Ukraine. Specifically, increasing respondents’ collective efficacy, on average, disincentivizes them from running for city parliament. Most surprisingly, citizens with higher pre-treatment levels of internal political efficacy were the ones most dissuaded from running for office after the induction of collective efficacy. Their improved sense of collective efficacy might have discouraged them from political institutions that they consider powerless and inefficient.
Altogether, these findings challenge existing wisdom in comparative political psychology by demonstrating that (1) psychological pathways to collective action are more context-dependent than previously assumed; (2) previously established effects of personality traits and self-evaluations on political behavior do not travel well beyond Western European and North American contexts; (3) self-efficacy and collective efficacy do not differ in their causal effects on individual attitudes and behavior; and (4) politically sophisticated individuals are put off from political office when reminded of alternative non-political ways of achieving collective goals, with this running from office creating a trap of declining political ambition in weak democracies. Thus, democratic promotion campaigns that increase self-efficacy or collective efficacy might suppress nascent political ambition when the population is skeptical of the quality of representative democratic institutions.
... First, with some exceptions-including the studies reviewed aboveextant literature has primarily investigated how education more generally is linked to conventional political participation aiming to channel preferences within the framework of current political institutions, such as voting (see e.g., Berinsky & Lenz, 2011;Dee, 2004;Freeman, 2003) and party membership (see e.g., El-Said & Rauch, 2015;Persson, 2015;Sondheimer & Green, 2010). This includes recent regression-discontinuity studies of national education reforms, identifying both participation enhancing (Larreguy & Marshall, 2017) and dampening effects (Croke et al., 2016). Yet, the insights from studies of education and political participation cannot be easily applied to "contentious politics"-including mass protest-understood as political actions aiming to "fundamentally challenge others or authorities" (Tarrow, 1994). ...
History suggests universities are hotbeds of political protest. However, the generality and causal nature of this relationship has never been quantified. This article investigates whether universities give rise to political protest, drawing on geocoded information on the location and characteristics of universities and protest events in the 1991–2016 period, at the subnational level in 62 countries in Africa and Central America. Our analysis indicates that university establishments increase protest. We use a difference-in-differences and fixed-effect framework leveraging the temporal variation in universities within subnational grid-cells to estimate the effect of universities on protest. Our analysis indicates that localities with increases in number of universities experience more protest. We suggest a causal interpretation, after performing different tests to evaluate whether this reflects confounding trends specific to locations that establish universities, finding no support for this. We also provide descriptive evidence on the nature of university-related protests, showing that they are more likely to emerge in dictatorships and that protests in university locations are more likely to concern democracy and human rights. These findings yield important general insights into universities’ role as drivers of contentious collective action.
... Our estimates imply that large changes in human capital, on the scale of the Jewish expulsion, can have long lasting impacts on political behaviour by altering schooling attainments and adult civic skills. This is consistent with the results of recent empirical studies on the impact of schooling on political behaviour (Campante and Chor, 2012;Dee, 2004;Larreguy and Marshall, 2017;Milligan et al., 2004;Siedler, 2010). A key distinction in our study is highlighting the importance of context-relevant civic skills, because lower schooling and labour market outcomes do not necessarily imply a decline in political participation (Bellows andMiguel, 2006, 2009). ...
This study provides evidence that individuals who grew up during the 1930's Jewish expulsions are less likely to show interest and participate in politics. The estimates imply that, at the mean, individuals in their impressionable ages at the time of the expulsions are about 13% less likely to be interested in politics and 26% less likely to participate in politics. These results are not found for individuals who were older at the time of the expulsions nor for those growing up during world War (WWII). Results are robust to fixed region and birth‐year characteristics, various definitions of impressionable ages, and composition bias induced by differential migration and mortality rates across regions and cohorts. The estimates are also not driven by other regional differences in 1930's political participation, party support, Catholic share, exposure and destruction during WWII, urbanization, and other regional characteristics. We provide evidence that the adverse effects on political attitudes we find are explained by a model of political participation emphasizing the role of civic skills and socioeconomic status acquired at younger ages. Exposure to the expulsions when young is associated with lower adult volunteerism, trust, church attendance, and socioeconomic status. (JEL O12, D72, D74, J15)
Young citizens vote at relatively low rates, which contributes to political parties de-prioritizing youth preferences. We analyze the effects of low-cost online interventions in encouraging young Moroccans to cast an informed vote in the 2021 elections. These interventions aim to reduce participation costs by providing information about the registration process and by highlighting the election's stakes and the distance between respondents' preferences and party platforms. Contrary to preregistered expectations, the interventions did not increase average turnout, yet exploratory analysis shows that the interventions designed to increase benefits did increase the turnout intention of uncertain baseline voters. Moreover, information about parties' platforms increased support for the party closest to the respondents' preferences, leading to better-informed voting. Results are consistent with motivated reasoning, which is surprising in a context with weak party institutionalization.
Male children have a survival disadvantage in most societies, a situation largely attributed to genetic fatality. Little is known about whether male genetic expression can be constrained by appropriate social interventions. We examine whether, and how, change in political regime type affects excess male infant mortality. Analyzing data on more than 3 million live births from sub-Saharan African countries, we exploit within-mother variation in political regime type in combination with two strategies (DID, RDD) and various robustness checks for causal identification. We find that excess male infant mortality falls by more than 13 percent following a transition to democracy. We identify the degree of competitiveness of executive recruitment, the responsiveness of the executive authority and the competitiveness of political participation as the features of democracy that matter more in the reduction of excess male infant mortality. Examining possible mechanisms, we find that democracies reduce the male-female inequality in infant mortality not by redistributing resources, but by increasing broader access to basic goods and services such as maternal immunization and access to improved water, which are associated with stronger health benefits for boys than for girls, despite being found to be ex-ante “gender-neutral” in our setting. Moreover, analyzing data on twins, we show that democracy significantly constrains genetic influences on male infant mortality. We rule out the hypothesis of hormonal (testosterone) transfer and discrimination against girls as possible mechanisms driving our findings.
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Migration is among the central domestic and global political issues of today. Yet the causes and consequences - and the relationship between migration and global markets – are poorly understood. Migration is both costly and risky, so why do people decide to migrate? What are the political, social, economic, and environmental factors that cause people to leave their homes and seek a better life elsewhere? Leblang and Helms argue that political factors - the ability to participate in the political life of a destination - are as important as economic and social factors. Most migrants don't cut ties with their homeland but continue to be engaged, both economically and politically. Migrants continue to serve as a conduit for information, helping drive investment to their homelands. The authors combine theory with a wealth of micro and macro evidence to demonstrate that migration isn't static, after all, but continuously fluid.
Why do some of Africa's urban areas experience higher rates of protest incidence than others? Numerous authors have highlighted the role of urbanisation and democratisation in determining cross-national variation in the rates of urban protest. Yet understanding has been hindered by failures to measure mechanisms at the appropriate spatial scale, analyse a sufficiently representative sample of urban centres, de-confound local and country-level factors, and consider what it is about specific urban centres that shapes variation in protest incidence. This paper presents new evidence on the determinants of protests in African urban centres by linking georeferenced data on urban settlements from the Urban Centres Database to the location of protest events taken from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset. Fitting a series of multilevel regression models with cross-level effects, we simultaneously estimate variation in protest incidence as a function of local- and country-level factors and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that variation in protest incidence between urban centres can be explained by a combination of local-specific and country-level contextual factors including population size and growth, regime type, civil society capacity, and whether an urban centre is politically significant. These findings advance our understanding of how political and demographic factors interact and influence protest incidence in urban Africa.
This chapter is an update that examines the effect of using “deliberation” as a tool for teaching at the college level. The students in this study considered the economic benefits and expenses of a box store. Deliberation provides a unique insight into what might be a better understanding of what students are thinking. The literature review contains various forms of deliberation including the process of deliberation in education; the outcomes of deliberative polling events; deliberation with technology; and whether working has an impact on students who deliberate. The use of pre- and posttest surveys shows that students who engaged in a deliberative dialogue were more likely to increase their civic learning and to change their opinions about the issues discussed. The findings demonstrate that deliberation pedagogy influences students' beliefs at both the individual and aggregate level.
We use Italian data to estimate the effect of schooling on voter turnout in national elections. We contrast results based on individual self-reported voting with those based on accurate administrative data on voter turnout, by municipality. In both analyses, we find a negative effect of education, stronger in the latter, where misreporting is ruled out. We also find that education especially reduces turnout in the poorer areas, in areas with lower social capital, with more cases of political misconduct and inefficient institutions. We rationalize our findings as an expression of dissatisfaction and civic protest.
Young people are not consistently or adequately valued by other global and community actors as contributing members and leaders. Given the current political context of democratic backsliding, school closures, and social distancing caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, young people are facing increased barriers to developing their democratic identities, learning how to be active citizens, and exercising their rights to participate in civic and political life. Now more than ever, development practitioners and the international community need to shift their approach to engaging young people in democracy and governance programs from one that views them as recipients to one that treats young people as partners and considers the unique environments in which they live. This paper argues that civic education programs that apply a positive youth development (PYD) approach can inform and shape how young people develop democratic identities and habits and directly link these identities and behaviors to building and sustaining democracies. The paper illuminates good practices and lessons learned through an exploration of global civic education programs demonstrating the utility of a PYD approach. The final section identifies areas to consider for the expansion and future of civic education programs to ensure their effectiveness and better link them to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Turnout during elections is feared to expand the spread and fatalities from COVID-19 because the disease quickly spreads in crowded places. Existing studies have focused on determining whether turnout during the pandemic increased the risk of more cases of or deaths from COVID-19. Others focused on the potential impact of the epidemic on voter turnout and absentee voting. The present study explores the powers of conventional variables to predict voter turnout while controlling for opinions on the safety measures for curtailing COVID-19. This study was conducted in Lagos State, the epicentre of COVID-19 in Nigeria. Three local government areas (LGA) were purposively selected as they are the hub of COVID-19 in Lagos State, namely Eti-Osa, Lagos Mainland, and Ikeja LGAs. Lagos is the commercial hub of West Africa and the largest city in Africa by population. The study engages a cross-sectional survey in the 31 wards in the three LGAs (Eti-Osa has 10 Wards, Lagos Mainland 11 wards, Ikeja has ten wards). A total of 450 copies of the questionnaire (150 in each LGA) was administered to residents aged 18 and above (i.e., those eligible to vote) in all the wards. However, 397 questionnaires were correctly filled and returned, representing 88.22%. Thus, the population of the study is 397. The study’s instrument was tested for reliability and validity using the Cronbach's Alpha with a score of 0.79. The study employed classic models of political participation including the political efficacy model, socio-economic model, demographic model and social connectedness model. Results indicate a general tendency to believe COVID-19 is not real in Nigeria, and most of the safety measures in fighting against the virus are not essential. COVID-19 sceptics are significantly more likely to vote during the pandemic. However, since most sceptics do not have trust in government and hence abstain, voter turnout during the pandemic is likely to be very low because people who would have voted (i.e., those having trust in government) prefer not to turnout rather than contract the virus. The paper indicates the essentials of the social connectedness and political efficacy models for exploring the relationship between COVID-19 and political participation. The implication of the study is that epidemics akin to COVID-19 can impact electoral and democratic systems by reducing the legitimacy of elections–via diminishing voter turnout. Higher levels of electoral participation confer legitimacy on the elected officials to pilot the affairs of the people.
While the robust and positive relationship between education and political engagement has been widely documented, the direct causal link is still a subject of debate. This study contributes to the ongoing debate by presenting suggestive evidence for the ‘cause’ view on the causal effect of education on political engagement. Exploiting the plausibly exogenous variation in education induced by the compulsory schooling reforms across 39 countries, we find that education cultivates political interest, promotes the acquisition of political knowledge, and fosters supportive attitudes towards political freedoms. Nevertheless, the better educated are no more likely to vote in elections nor adopt any specific position in the left–right political spectrum.
The paper investigates the relationships between COVID-19 and voter turnout. Current studies have focused on determining whether turnout during the pandemic increased the risk of more cases of or deaths from COVID-19 and others focused on the potential impact of the epidemic on voter turnout and absentee voting. The present study explores, via hierarchical multiple regression, the powers of traditional variables to predict voter turnout while controlling for opinions on the safety measures for curtailing COVID-19. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey in Lagos, the epicenter of the pandemic in Nigeria. Results indicate a general tendency to believe COVID-19 is not real in Nigeria, and most of the safety measures in fighting against the virus are not essential. COVID-19 skeptics are significantly more likely to vote during the pandemic. However, since most skeptics do not have trust in government and hence abstain, voter turnout during the pandemic is likely to be very low because people who would have voted (i.e., those having trust in government) prefer not to turnout rather than contract the virus. The paper indicates the essentials of the social connectedness and political efficacy models for exploring the connection between COVID-19 and political participation.
This paper examines the effect of female education on child mortality in Indonesia by exploiting a one-time change in the length of the 1978 school year as a source of exogenous variation in education. The results show that the education reform increases women’s educational attainment by 0.76 years and that one additional year of female education leads to a decrease in neonatal mortality by 0.5 percentage points. Mechanism analysis suggests that higher female education postpones the timing of marriage and of first birth, leads to higher quality of spouse and higher household wealth and increases the use of prenatal health care and mass media. However, I do not find significant impacts of female education on women’s empowerment in the household.
An extensive social scientific literature has documented the importance of schooling in preventing overweight and obesity among women. However, prior quasi-experimental studies investigating the causal effect of schooling on women's overweight and obesity have focused almost exclusively on high-income countries (HICs). Schooling effects may differ in low- or middle-income countries (LMICs), where information about the harms of being overweight is often sparse and where larger body sizes can be socially valued. Here I evaluate the causal impact of schooling on women's probability of being overweight or obese in an LMIC, Nigeria, using data from the 2003, 2008, and 2013 Demographic Health Surveys. In 1976, the Nigerian government abolished primary school fees and increased funding for primary school construction, creating quasi-random variation in access to primary school according to an individual's age and the number of newly constructed schools in their state of residence. I exploit both sources of variation and use a two-stage instrumental variables approach to estimate the effect of increased schooling on the probability of being overweight or obese. Each additional year of schooling increased the probability of being overweight or obese by 6%, but this effect estimate was not statistically different from zero. This finding differs from the protective effect of schooling documented in several HICs, suggesting that contextual factors play an important role calibrating the influence of additional schooling on overweight or obesity. Furthermore, my findings contrast markedly with the positive correlation between schooling and overweight/obesity identified in previous studies in Nigeria, suggesting that studies failing to account for selection bias overestimate the causal effect of schooling. More robust causal research is needed to examine the effect of schooling on overweight and obesity in LMIC contexts.
This study intended to identify the influence of Generation Z’s perceptions on political parties and political education by mediating political leadership on the commitment to Pancasila. The study used a Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) approach. The population was high school students in Jakarta. The sample was 82 students in XI grade. The results showed the perception of political parties influenced the views of political leadership (0.627). Perceptions of political parties influenced Pancasila’s commitment (0.357). The strongest influence was found to be in political education on the commitment of the Pancasila (0.722). Political education did not influence the views of political leadership (-0.009). The view of political leadership did not influence the commitment of the Pancasila (-0.194). The view of political leadership was not a factor influencing generation Z’s commitment to Pancasila. Generation Z’s commitment to Pancasila was influenced by two factors, namely political parties and political education. Political education was the highest factor influencing generation Z’s commitment to Pancasila.
The study investigates the effects of English language as an instruction medium on the academic performance of second language learners (SLL), especially Yoruba learners in Ilesha West Local Government of Osun state. Furthermore, this study intends to explore and suggest alternative approaches which may be initiated in a bid to improve performance in ESL while still using English language as the instruction medium and to contribute towards promoting other indigenous languages of Nigeria to equal status as instruction medium in schools. The geographical location of Ilesha West Local Government area of Osun State, Nigeria was examined to explore how English language as the instruction medium affects the academic performance of second language learners (SLL), especially Yoruba learners. The population used for this study consisted purposive sampling of selected secondary school students in Ilesha West Local Government. Sixty (60) students, were selected to form the sample. The questionnaire was used as the research instrument. The questionnaires were analysed using the simple percentile descriptive method. The results of the study showed that there are variables within the formal and informal environments that impact on the academic performance of English as second language learners. It is also revealed from the findings that there are possible strategies by which English as second language learners’ performance could improve while the English Language remains the medium of instruction. Furthermore, the result reveals that English Language as an instruction medium affects academic performance from the point of view of learners.
Empirical support for economic voting is well documented in advanced democracies. We know less, however, about the extent and dynamics of economic voting in the developing democracies of sub-Saharan Africa. The relationship between economic perceptions and incumbent performance evaluations is a critical precursor to vote choice. I evaluate this link using more than fifty-five thousand individual-level observations across sixteen sub-Saharan African countries. I find that there exists a strong association between economic perception and performance evaluation while controlling for a host of covariates, including ethnicity, partisanship, information, and public goods provision. Contrary to previous findings, however, I show that the influence of economic perception is stronger than many other factors considered in the models such as coethnicity with the incumbent. Moreover, my findings indicate that coethnicity—but not copartisanship—conditions the influence of economic perception on performance evaluation. I use an instrumental variables approach to further validate the findings.
Studies show educated citizens are more likely to vote in elections but few papers look at the relationship in developing countries and even fewer analyze whether the relationship is causal. I examine whether education increases voter turnout and makes better-informed voters in Indonesia using an exogenous variation in education induced by an extension of Indonesia's school term length, which fits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. The longer school year increases education, but I do not find education increases voter turnout; it does not seem to affect voters’ views of political candidates’ religion, ethnicity, or gender when they vote either.
Using a unique data set on students from the first regional schools in colonial Benin, we investigate the effect of education
on living standards, occupation, and political participation. Since both school locations and student cohorts were selected
with very little information, treatment and control groups are balanced on observables. We can therefore estimate the effect
of education by comparing the treated to the untreated living in the same village, as well as those living in villages where
no schools were set up. We find a significant positive treatment effect of education for the first generation of students,
as well as their descendants: they have higher living standards, are less likely to be farmers, and are more likely to be
politically active. We find large village-level externalities—descendants of the uneducated in villages with schools do better
than those in control villages. We also find extended family externalities—nephews and nieces directly benefit from their
uncle’s education—and show that this represents a “family tax,” as educated uncles transfer resources to the extended family.
JEL Codes: N37, O15, J27.
Members of the same household share similar voting behaviors on average, but how much of this correlation can be attributed to the behavior of the other person in the household? Disentangling and isolating the unique effects of peer behavior, selection processes, and congruent interests is a challenge for all studies of interpersonal influence. This study proposes and utilizes a carefully designed placebo-controlled experimental protocol to overcome this identification problem. During a face-to-face canvassing experiment targeting households with two registered voters, residents who answered the door were exposed to either a Get Out the Vote message (treatment) or a recycling pitch (placebo). The turnout of the person in the household not answering the door allows for contagion to be measured. Both experiments find that 60% of the propensity to vote is passed onto the other member of the household. This finding suggests a mechanism by which civic participation norms are adopted and couples grow more similar over time.
Human behaviour is thought to spread through face-to-face social networks, but it is difficult to identify social influence effects in observational studies, and it is unknown whether online social networks operate in the same way. Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people. Furthermore, the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users' friends, and friends of friends. The effect of social transmission on real-world voting was greater than the direct effect of the messages themselves, and nearly all the transmission occurred between 'close friends' who were more likely to have a face-to-face relationship. These results suggest that strong ties are instrumental for spreading both online and real-world behaviour in human social networks.
Despite the proliferation of civic education programs in the emerging democracies of Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, there have been few recent evaluations of the effectiveness of civics instruction in achieving changes in democratic orientations among student populations. We present findings from a study conducted in 1998 that examined the impact of democratic civic education among South African high school students. Using a battery of items to gauge democratic orientations, including measures of political knowledge, civic duty, tolerance, institutional trust, civic skills, and approval of legal forms of political participation, we find that civic education had the largest effects on political knowledge, with the magnitude of the effect being approximately twice as large as the recent Niemi and Junn (1998) finding for the United States. Exposure to civic education per se had weaker effects on democratic values and skills; for these orientations, what matters are specific factors related to the quality of instruction and the use of active pedagogical methods employed by civics instructors. Further, we find that civic education changed the structure of students’ orientations: a “democratic values” dimension coalesces more strongly, and in greater distinction, from a “political competence” dimension among students exposed to civic education than among those with no such training. We discuss the implications of the findings for our theoretical understanding of the role of civic education in fostering democratic attitudes, norms, and values, as well as the practical implications of the results for the implementation and funding of civic education programs in developing democracies in the future.
The hypothesized effects of educational attainment on adult civic engagement and attitudes provide some of the most important justifications for government intervention in the market for education. In this study, I present evidence on whether these externalities exist. I assess and implement two strategies for identifying the effects of educational attainment. One is based on the availability of junior and community colleges; the other, on changes in teen exposure to child labor laws. The results suggest that educational attainment has large and statistically significant effects on subsequent voter participation and support for free speech. I also find that additional schooling appears to increase the quality of civic knowledge as measured by the frequency of newspaper readership.
We report the results of a randomized field experiment involving approximately 30,000 registered voters in New Haven, Connecticut. Nonpartisan get-out-the-vote messages were conveyed through personal canvassing, direct mail, and telephone calls shortly before the November 1998 election. A variety of substantive messages were used. Voter turnout was increased substantially by personal canvassing, slightly by direct mail, and not at all by telephone calls. These findings support our hypothesis that the long-term retrenchment in voter turnout is partly attributable to the decline in face-to-face political mobilization.
From the 1980 Maitatsine uprising to the 2009 Boko Haram uprising, Nigeria was bedevilled by ethno-religious conflicts with devastating human and material losses. But the Boko Haram uprising of July 2009 was significant in that it not only set a precedent, but also reinforced the attempts by Islamic conservative elements at imposing a variant of Islamic religious ideology on a secular state. Whereas the religious sensitivity of Nigerians provided fertile ground for the breeding of the Boko Haram sect, the sect’s blossoming was also aided by the prevailing economic dislocation in Nigerian society, the advent of party politics (and the associated desperation of politicians for political power), and the ambivalence of some vocal Islamic leaders, who, though they did not actively embark on insurrection, either did nothing to stop it from fomenting, or only feebly condemned it. These internal factors coupled with growing Islamic fundamentalism around the world make a highly volatile Nigerian society prone to violence, as evidenced by the Boko Haram uprising. Given the approach of the Nigerian state to religious conflict, this violence may remain a recurring problem. This paper documents and analyses the Boko Haram uprising, as well as its links with the promotion of Islamic revivalism and the challenges it poses to the secularity of the Nigerian state.
In this paper we note that the institutional context (and therefore the structure of incentives and organization) in developing and transition economies is quite different from those in advanced industrial economies, and this necessitates the literature on decentralization in the context of development to go beyond the traditional fiscal federalism literature. We review some of the existing theoretical work and empirical case studies of decentralization from the point of view of delivery of public services and of conditions for local business development, and point to ways of going forward in research.
Why do people vote? We design a field experiment to estimate a model of voting “because others will ask”. The expectation of being asked motivates turnout if individuals derive pride from telling others that they voted, or feel shame from admitting that they did not vote, provided that lying is costly. In a door-to-door survey about election turnout, we experimentally vary (1) the informational content and use of a flyer pre-announcing the survey, (2) the duration and payment for the survey, and (3) the incentives to lie about past voting. The experimental results indicate significant social image concerns. For the 2010 Congressional election, we estimate a value of voting “to tell others” of about
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15, contributing 2 percentage points to turnout. Finally, we evaluate a get-out-the-vote intervention in which we tell potential voters that we will ask if they voted.
Political scientists increasingly use instrumental variable (IV) methods, and must often choose between operationalizing their
endogenous treatment variable as discrete or continuous. For theoretical and data availability reasons, researchers frequently
coarsen treatments with multiple intensities (e.g., treating a continuous treatment as binary). I show how such coarsening
can substantially upwardly bias IV estimates by subtly violating the exclusion restriction assumption, and demonstrate that
the extent of this bias depends upon the first stage and underlying causal response function. However, standard IV methods
using a treatment where multiple intensities are affected by the instrument—even when fine-grained measurement at every intensity
is not possible—recover a consistent causal estimate without requiring a stronger exclusion restriction assumption. These
analytical insights are illustrated in the context of identifying the long-run effect of high school education on voting Conservative
in Great Britain. I demonstrate that coarsening years of schooling into an indicator for completing high school upwardly biases
the IV estimate by a factor of three.
Two-stage least squares (TSLS) is widely used in econometrics to estimate parameters in systems of linear simultaneous equations and to solve problems of omitted-variables bias in single-equation estimation. We show here that TSLS can also be used to estimate the average causal effect of variable treatments such as drug dosage, hours of exam preparation, cigarette smoking, and years of schooling. The average causal effect in which we are interested is a conditional expectation of the difference between the outcomes of the treated and what these outcomes would have been in the absence of treatment. Given mild regularity assumptions, the probability limit of TSLS is a weighted average of per-unit average causal effects along the length of an appropriately defined causal response function. The weighting function is illustrated in an empirical example based on the relationship between schooling and earnings.
I argue that if citizens systematically underestimate what their government can and should do for them, then they will hold politicians to a lower standard and sanction poor performers less often. A field experiment across 95 localities in Mali in which randomly assigned localities receive a civics course identifies the effect of raising voter expectations of government on their willingness to hold leaders accountable. The course provides information about local government capacity and responsibility as well as how local politicians perform relative to others, effectively raising voter expectations of what local governments can and should do. Survey experiments among individuals in treated and control communities (N = 5,560) suggest that people in treated villages are indeed more likely to sanction poor performers and vote based on performance more often. A behavioral outcome—the likelihood that villagers challenge local leaders at a town hall meeting—adds external validity to survey findings.
The poor and disadvantaged are widely seen as having weak organizations and low rates of participation in community associations, impeding their political representation and economic advancement. Many policy initiatives aim to build civic participation among the disadvantaged by funding local community associations. Taking advantage of random assignment in a program supporting women's community associations in Kenya, we find little evidence that outside funding expanded organizational strength, but substantial evidence that funding changed group membership and leadership, weakening the role of the disadvantaged. The program led younger, more educated, and better-off women to enter the groups. New entrants, men, and more educated women assumed leadership positions. The departure of older women, the most socially marginalized demographic group, increased substantially. The results are generalized through a formal model showing how democratic decision making by existing members of community associations can generate long-run outcomes in which the poor and disadvantaged either do not belong to any associations or belong to weak organizations.
We study a randomized educational intervention in 550 households in 26 matched villages in two Kenyan districts. The intervention provided parents with information about their children’s performance on literacy and numeracy tests, and materials about how to become more involved in improving their children’s learning. We find the provision of such information had no discernible impact on either private or collective action. In discussing these findings, we articulate a causal chain linking information provision to changes in citizens’ behavior, and assess the present intervention at each step. Future research on information provision should pay greater attention to this causal chain.
This article attempts to explain the determinants of the probability of willingness to join rebel groups by youths in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, using primary data from a sample of 1,337 individuals drawn from 18 communities. A cardinal objective is to test the theoretical explanations of the motivation for rebellion in resource-based societies and to examine the kind of factors that present rebel opportunity. Fifteen variables are used to reflect motives and opportunity for rebellion, and a logit regression model is employed to estimate the probability of willingness to participate. While grievance appears to be pervasive among individuals- and is systemically explained by the data, it is not seen to have high statistical effect on the probability of having a disposition to rebel participation. Rather, individual-and community-level factors that reduce the opportunity cost and risk of participation, or increase the perceived benefits, appear to be more important. The findings suggest that strategies to achieve long-lasting civil peace in Nigeria's Delta must go beyond grievance to address individual-level factors that determine the opportunity cost of participation in violence, such as low income level and low educational attainment, and community-level factors that create an opportunity to profit from extreme forms of civil disobedience, such as low infrastructure. Some of these strategies choices are found also to have the potential to address grievance.
The conditions associated with the existence and stability of democratic society have been a leading concern of political philosophy. In this paper the problem is attacked from a sociological and behavioral standpoint, by presenting a number of hypotheses concerning some social requisites for democracy, and by discussing some of the data available to test these hypotheses. In its concern with conditions—values, social institutions, historical events—external to the political system itself which sustain different general types of political systems, the paper moves outside the generally recognized province of political sociology. This growing field has dealt largely with the internal analysis of organizations with political goals, or with the determinants of action within various political institutions, such as parties, government agencies, or the electoral process. It has in the main left to the political philosopher the larger concern with the relations of the total political system to society as a whole.
This essay examines the existing variation in democratization trajectories in African states since the early 1990s. In particular, it shows that variations are tightly correlated with the quality of legislative elections. Evidence presented suggests a potential mechanism to explain the “democratization through elections†hypothesis. African states with clean legislative elections also exhibit a trend toward greater democratization. A brief presentation of the cases of Cameroon and Zambia show that legislative empowerment is key to democratization.
This article examines two unexplored questions concerning the impact of civic education programs in emerging democracies: (1) whether such programs have longer-terms effects and (2) whether civic education can be effective under conditions of democratic "backsliding." We investigate these questions in the context of a large-scale civic education program in Kenya just before the disputed 2007 election that sparked a wave of ethnic clashes and brought the country to the brink of civil war. Analysis of a survey of 1,800 "treatment" and 1,800 "control" individuals shows that the program had significant long-term effects on variables related to civic competence and engagement, with less consistent effects on democratic values. We also find that participants who subsequently were affected by the violence were less likely to adopt negative beliefs about Kenya's political system, less likely to support the use of ethnic or political violence, and more likely to forgive those responsible for the post-election violence.
What explains the varied ways that Africans practice citizenship on an everyday basis? And how does the extent of state building (or neoliberal unbuilding) in a particular context affect the way individual Africans think about the rights, duties, and appropriate channels for exercising their citizenship? Over the past 20 years across most of sub-Saharan Africa, neoliberal economic reform has meant a major retrenchment of the state in the provision of health and education services. This article argues that Africans who have at least some experience with public schools and clinics are more likely to exercise their citizenship on a more frequent basis than those who have no experience of state social services at all. The article confirms the existence of policy feedbacks between the micro experience of state social policy and democratic consolidation in Africa.
The consensus in the empirical literature on political participation is that education positively correlates with political participation. Theoretical explanations posit that education confers participation-enhancing benefits that in and of themselves cause political activity. As most of the variation in educational attainment arises between high school completion and decisions to enter postsecondary institutions, we focus our inquiry on estimating the effect of higher education on political participation. Our primary purpose is to test the conventional claim that higher education causes political participation. We utilize propensity-score matching to address the nonrandom assignment process that characterizes the acquisition of higher education. After the propensity-score matching process takes into account preadult experiences and influences in place during the senior year of high school, the effects of higher education per se on participation disappear. Our results thus call for a reconsideration of how scholars understand the positive empirical relationship between higher education and participation: that higher education is a proxy for preadult experiences and influences, not a cause of political participation.
Civil society has been a central force in political and economic reforms. The
activities and even proliferation of civil groups have been seen by several
authors as vital to the democratisation project and its sustenance. Only a
few scholars have pointed to the roles that civil groups may play in undermining
democracy and national stability. In Nigeria, civil society was in the
vanguard of the democratic struggle, but recent events are pointing to the
negative roles played by some civil groups in the construction of platforms
for ethnic militancy and violent confrontation with other groups and the
state. Based on evidence from three cases of civil groups, the paper identifies
goals, methods, strategies and tendencies that indicate intense primordialism,
militancy and violence. The study finds that in plural societies, civil society
may become so parochial, divisive, divergent and disarticulative that it
actually undermines democracy.
Voter turnout theories based on rational self-interested behavior generally fail to predict significant turnout unless they account for the utility that citizens receive from performing their civic duty. We distinguish between two aspects of this type of utility, intrinsic satisfaction from behaving in accordance with a norm and extrinsic incentives to comply, and test the effects of priming intrinsic motives and applying varying degrees of extrinsic pressure. A large-scale field experiment involving several hundred thousand registered voters used a series of mailings to gauge these effects. Substantially higher turnout was observed among those who received ailings promising to publicize their turnout to their household or their neighbors. These findings demonstrate the profound importance of social pressure as an inducement to political participation.
Scholars have long speculated about education’s political impacts, variously arguing that it promotes modern or pro-democratic attitudes; that it instills acceptance of existing authority; and that it empowers the disadvantaged to challenge authority. To avoid endogeneity bias, if schooling requires some willingness to accept authority, we assess the political and social impacts of a randomized girls’ merit scholarship incentive program in Kenya that raised test scores and secondary schooling. We find little evidence for modernization theory. Consistent with the empowerment view, young women in program schools were less likely to accept domestic violence. Moreover, the program increased objective political knowledge, and reduced acceptance of political authority. However, this rejection of the status quo did not translate into greater perceived political efficacy, community participation, or voting intentions. Instead, the perceived legitimacy of political violence increased. Reverse causality may help account for the view that education instills greater acceptance of authority.
With an estimated 115 million children not attending primary school in the developing world, increasing access to education is critical. Resource constraints limit the effectiveness of demand-based subsidies. This paper focuses on the importance of a supply-side factor -- the availability of low-cost teachers --and the resulting ability of the market to offer affordable education. The authors first show that private schools are three times more likely to emerge in villages with government girls'secondary schools (GSS). Identification is obtained by using official school construction guidelines as an instrument for the presence of GSS. In contrast, there is little or no relationship between the presence of a private school and girls'primary or boys'primary and secondary government schools. In support of a supply-channel, the authors then show that, for villages that received a GSS, there are over twice as many educated women and that private school teachers'wages are 27 percent lower in these villages. In an environment with poor female education and low mobility, GSS substantially increase the local supply of skilled women lowering wages locally and allowing the market to offer affordable education. These findings highlight the prominent role of women as teachers in facilitating educational access and resonate with similar historical evidence from developed economies. The students of today are the teachers of tomorrow.
Theory and evidence suggests that respondents are likely to overreport voter turnout in election surveys because they have a strong incentive to offer a socially desirable response. We suggest that contextual influences may affect the socially desirable bias, leading to variance in the rate of overreporting across countries. This leads us to hypothesize that nonvoters will be more likely to overreport voting in elections that have high turnout. We rely on validated turnout data to measure overreporting in five countries which vary a great deal in turnout: Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. We find that in national settings with higher levels of participation, the tendency to overreport turnout may be greater than in settings where low participation is the norm.
How does civic education affect the development of democratic political culture in new democracies? Using a unique three-wave panel data set from Kenya spanning the transitional democratic election of 2002, we posit a two-step process of the social transmission of democratic knowledge, norms, and values. Civic education first affected the knowledge, values, and participatory inclinations of individuals directly exposed to the Kenyan National Civic Education Programme (NCEP). These individuals became opinion leaders, communicating these new orientations to others within their social networks. Individuals who discussed others’ civic education experiences then showed significant growth in democratic knowledge and values, in many instances more than individuals with direct exposure to the program. We find further evidence of a “compensation effect,” such that the impact of civic education and post-civic education discussion was greater among Kenyans with less education and with lower levels of social integration.
The paper critically examines the quality of education in Nigeria's Universal Primary Education (UPE) scheme from 1976 to 1986. The author argues that the positive impact of the UPE scheme was that more people went to school, and many of them can now read and write their names and seem to be better informed. But the standard of Seaming fell far below what it was before the introduction of the UPE scheme in Nigeria. Those who planned the scheme apparently forgot to consider the importance of the availability of qualified teachers, adequate learning environments, equipment and textbooks, classroom management and supervision, and the content of the curriculum. Since availability of the above facilities is integral to effective teaching and classroom performance, the inevitable outcome was the erosion of standards in Nigeria's primary education. The author advises other developing countries to act cautiously when embarking on prestige educational projects, such as the UPE scheme, as a means to combat ignorance and illiteracy. It is also hoped that the Nigerian experience will lead to a further understanding of the postulation by educational analysts of school facilities as major factors in effective teaching and determining the quality of learning in the developing countries.
The relationship between nonformal education (NFE) and democracy has not been subject to empirical examination. Given the
prominence that NFE has gained in many countries, such as those in Africa, this inattention is unfortunate. Using data from
a survey involving a probability sample of 1484 Senegalese citizens, this paper examines the effects of education, both formal
and nonformal, on political participation among rural Senegalese. The results indicate that NFE and formal education tend
to have similar effects on several political behaviors, but the effect of NFE generally appears to be stronger. NFE has a
positive impact on political participation. NFE increases the likelihood that one will vote and contact officials regarding
community and personal problems. In addition, NFE has a strong, positive impact on community participation.
The literature generally points to a negative relationship between female education and fertility. Citing this pattern, policymakers have advocated educating girls and young women as a means to reduce population growth and foster sustained economic and social welfare in developing countries. This paper tests whether the relationship between fertility and education is indeed causal by investigating the introduction of universal primary education in Nigeria. Exploiting differences in program exposure by region and age, the paper presents reduced form and instrumental variables estimates of the impact of female education on fertility. The analysis suggests that increasing female education by one year reduces early fertility by 0.26 births.
Vote buying and political intimidation are characteristic dimensions of African election campaigns. According to survey-based estimates, almost one out of five Nigerians is personally exposed to vote buying and almost one in ten experiences threats of electoral violence. But when, as commonly happens, campaign irregularities are targeted at the rural poor, effects are concentrated. These effects are as follows: violence reduces turnout; and vote buying enhances partisan loyalty. But, perhaps because most citizens condemn campaign manipulation as wrong, compliance with the wishes of politicians is not assured. Defection from threats and agreements is more common than compliance, especially where voters are cross-pressured from both sides of the partisan divide.
Many studies document an association between schooling and civic participation, but none credibly investigate causal links. We explore the effect of extra schooling induced through compulsory schooling laws on the likelihood of becoming politically involved in the United States and the United Kingdom. We find that educational attainment is related to several measures of political interest and involvement in both countries. We find a strong and robust relationship between education and voting for the United States, but not for the United Kingdom. Our US results approach the UK findings when conditioning on registration, possibly indicating that registration rules present a barrier to participation.
This study uses the malaria-eradication campaigns in the United States (circa 1920) and in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico (circa 1955) to measure how much childhood exposure to malaria depresses labor productivity. The campaigns began because of advances in health technology, which mitigates concerns about reverse causality. Malarious areas saw large drops in the disease thereafter. Relative to non-malarious areas, cohorts born after eradication had higher income as adults than the preceding generation. These cross-cohort changes coincided with childhood exposure to the campaigns rather than to pre-existing trends. Estimates suggest a substantial, though not predominant, role for malaria in explaining cross-region differences in income. (JEL I12, I18, J13, O15)
Following the wave of democratization during the 1990s, elections are now common in low-income societies. However, these elections are frequently flawed. We investigate the Nigerian general election of 2007, which is to date the largest election held in Africa and one seriously marred by violence. We designed and conducted a nationwide field experiment based on randomized anti-violence grassroots campaigning. We find direct effects on violence outcomes from exploring both subject-surveying and independent data sources. Crucially, we establish that voter intimidation is effective in reducing voter turnout, and that the violence was systematically dissociated from incumbents. We suggest that incumbents have a comparative advantage in alternative strategies, vote buying and ballot fraud. Voter intimidation may be a strategy of the weak analogous to terrorism.
This chapter discusses job market signaling. The term market signaling is not exactly a part of the well-defined, technical vocabulary of the economist. The chapter presents a model in which signaling is implicitly defined and explains its usefulness. In most job markets, the employer is not sure of the productive capabilities of an individual at the time he hires him. The fact that it takes time to learn an individual's productive capabilities means that hiring is an investment decision. On the basis of previous experience in the market, the employer has conditional probability assessments over productive capacity with various combinations of signals and indices. This chapter presents an introduction to Spence's more extensive analysis of market signaling.
In the last two decades, the social and economic benefits of formal education in Sub-Saharan Africa have been debated. Anecdotal evidence points to low returns to education in Africa. Unfortunately, there is limited econometric evidence to support these claims at the micro level. In this study, I focus on Nigeria, a country that holds 1/5 of Africa's population. I use instruments based on the exogenous timing of the implementation and withdrawal of free primary education across regions in this country to consistently estimate the returns to education in the late 1990s. The results show the average returns to education are particularly low in the 90s, in contrast to conventional wisdom for developing countries (2.8% for every extra year of schooling between 1997 and 1999). Surprisingly, I find no significant differences between OLS and IV estimates of returns to education when necessary controls are included in the wage equation. The low returns to education results shed new light on both the changes in demand for education in Nigeria and the increased emigration rates from African countries that characterized the 90s.
Across countries, education and democracy are highly correlated. We motivate empirically and then model a causal mechanism explaining this correlation. In our model, schooling teaches people to interact with others and raises the benefits of civic participation, including voting and organizing. In the battle between democracy and dictatorship, democracy has a wide potential base of support but offers weak incentives to its defenders. Dictatorship provides stronger incentives to a narrower base. As education raises the benefits of civic engagement, it raises participation in support of a broad-based regime (democracy) relative to that in support of a narrow-based regime (dictatorship). This increases the likelihood of successful democratic revolutions against dictatorships, and reduces that of successful anti-democratic coups. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007
Little empirical research has been done on civic education in new democracies. This article appraises, through a comparison of results from two social surveys, the effects on political culture of several civic education programs conducted principally by nongovernmental organizations in Zambia. Among its findings are that: civic education has observable positive effects, but mainly among privileged elements in society; civic education has consistently greater impact on citizens' knowledge and values than on their political behavior; and, with the possible exception of informal methods such as drama shows, means have yet to be devised to induce citizens to become active voters.