Data for: The non-democratic roots of mass education: Evidence from 200 years

Abstract

This is an Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) data project. The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website. Project Summary This project assesses the impact of democratization on primary school enrollment rates using quantitative data from 1820 to 2010 to estimate difference-in-differences and interrupted time series models of the impact of democratization. It finds that, on average, there is little evidence to support the claim that democratization led to the expansion of primary schooling. The study then unpacks this average result to explain what lies behind the null effect. It finds that democracy can lead to the expansion of primary schooling, but the key condition under which it does—when a majority of the population lacked access to primary schooling before democratization—rarely holds. Indeed, the study documents that, among countries that experienced democratization, the average primary school enrollment rate was already 70% before transitioning to democracy. Although the project does not seek to provide a conclusive answer to why there was so much provision of primary education under non-democracies, the section titled “Primary School Systems Under Non-Democracies” explores several possible answers to help readers entertain the possibility that the provision of primary education may have been high under non-democracies—because this is a counterintuitive finding given the previous literature in political science and economics. With that modest goal in mind, this section surveys existing research in history, sociology, political science, and economics to parse out four common arguments for the provision of primary schooling under non-democratic regimes; provides exploratory quantitative tests for these arguments; and, using online annotations, provides qualitative evidence that illustrates these arguments. Data Generation and Analysis The gathering of qualitative evidence focused on either the founding period of primary education systems or the period of fastest expansion of primary schooling in six non-democratic regimes chosen to have variation across space and over time: Prussia (1750s and 1760s), France (1830s), Chile (1860s), Argentina (1880s), USSR (1930s), and China (1950s). For each case, the author gathered primary and secondary sources in English, Spanish, or French that provided evidence about the rationales used by non-democratic regimes to expand access to primary education. On average five sources per country were analyzed, including: speech transcripts by presidents, ministers of education, and congressmen from parliamentary debates; newspaper and magazines articles, letters, books, memoirs, and other documents written by politicians who participated in education debates; reports written by official government missions from foreign countries that traveled to learn about the selected education systems; official education laws and regulations; books and PhD dissertations specializing on the history of education of these cases. All sources analyzed were obtained from Stanford Libraries, UCSD Libraries, HathiTrust, the Biblioteca Nacional del Maestro in Argentina, or the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. Language limitations implied a greater ability to consult primary sources from Argentina, Chile, and France than from Prussia, the USSR, and China, where reliance on secondary sources was greater. For each source, the author extracted citations that provided evidence of the rationales espoused by non-democratic regimes to provide primary education. Each citation was classified using a common coding scheme based on the type of argument being made for the provision of primary education: molding political values and behaviors, industrialization, military strength, promoting the social mobility of the lower classes, responding to parental demand, staying in vogue with global ideas, or other reasons. A set of 45 citations (out of 150) were identified as “strong” evidence for three types of common arguments for primary education provision under non-democratic regimes: molding political values and behaviors, industrialization, and military strength. The other theorized arguments appeared less often and either lacked strong evidence in the sampled sources (staying in vogue with global ideas, promoting social mobility) or had strong evidence against them (responding to parental demand). Logic of Annotation Online annotations were used to illustrate those arguments for which strong qualitative evidence was found. The citations included in the annotations were chosen so as to provide as clear an illustration of a theoretical argument as possible within a relatively short amount of space (i.e., without requiring readers to read an entire book or parliamentary debate transcript). Analytic notes were used in almost all annotations to offer additional context about a source and its author, and to specify the interpretations made from a citation or set of citations.