From Education to Democracy?

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, Pierre Yared

NBER Working Paper No. 11204
Issued in March 2005
NBER Program(s):   EFG   LS   POL

The conventional wisdom views high levels of education as a prerequisite for democracy. This paper shows that existing evidence for this view is based on cross-sectional correlations, which disappear once we look at within-country variation. In other words, there is no evidence that countries that increase their education are more likely to become democratic.

(218 K)

Published: Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson and Pierre Yared. "From Education To Democracy?," American Economic Review, 2005, v95(2,May), 44-49.

This paper is available as PDF (218 K) or via email.

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX