Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Want a better democracy? Build better primary schools

As a wave of nation-building sweeps across North Africa and the Middle East, those striving for democracies would do well to keep education high on their priorities -- especially for young children.

Better primary schooling leads to a more robust democracy, though the reverse isn’t true, according to a recent working paper from the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research.

Fabrice Murtin, an OECD economist in Paris, and Romain Wacziarg, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared 74 countries’ democracy scores from 1870 to 2000 with their educational attainment.

The economists found that, in high-income countries, about half of the average variation in democracy came from better primary schooling. Increased levels of secondary and post-secondary education, however, showed little effect on a country’s democracy.

Why the importance of a child’s first few years? It’s when citizens learn to read and literacy rates can be linked to political participation, the authors posit. As well, mass enrolment in higher education only came up in high-income countries in the last quarter of the 20th century -- where democracy was already firmly established, and there were little gains to be made.

The authors also compared income to democracy, and found higher per capita GDP had a far smaller effect than schooling. In fact, while income was significant in some cases, the economists found that primary schooling was important in every period they studied.

(Another NBER working paper from earlier in the year found that there is sometimes a statistically significant link between income and democracy.)

Mr. Murtin and Mr. Wacziarg then reversed their analysis - if primary schooling and, to a lesser extent, income affected the level of democracy, could strengthened political institutions have led to richer and better educated citizens?

No, according to their evidence, when you control for other factors (such as a country’s level of development).

The authors used Polity IV data for their democracy measurements. The index aims to measure governing authorities by quantifying values such as constraints on executive power and political competition.

Origin
Source: Globe&Mail 

No comments:

Post a Comment