Socioeconomic Environment, Political System, and Educational Policy Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis of 102 Countries

Abstract

While the structure and functioning of national political systems has always been a central concern of political scientists interested in comparative politics, the content of public policy is also a dependent variable which political scientists must endeavor to explain. Policy outcomes express the value commitments of political systems and these commitments are important political data. The task of comparative politics is to identify and assess the forces that shape and explain variations in public policy, and this includes educational policy. Mounting concern over the achievements of public education in the developed countries has drawn attention to the relationship between politics and educational policies in these countries.1 The growing recognition of the role of education in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East in providing the requisite skills, aspirations, resources, and values essential to the development of modern societies has been documented in many recent studies.2 All of this tends to greatly accentuate the need for examining policy outcomes in public education in the developed and developing countries. To date very little research has been reported which attempts to bring some of the conceptual models and statistical tools of political science to a comparative study of the independent variables that relate to educational policy outcomes in a large number of countries of the world.3 The purpose of the research reported below was to explore some of the determinants of educational policy outcomes in 102 national political systems for the 1964-65 period. Specifically, we wished to assess the impact of political system variables on educational outcomes, and to compare the effect of these political variables on educational outcomes with the effect of socioeconomic