When Does Education Promote Participation? The Role of Curriculum Reforms

• In Event: Civic Learning on Campus: Bringing Political Science In Mini-Conference I: Schools and Democracy: How Varieties of Education Matter for Citizenship

Abstract

There has been renewed global interest in the role of education to strengthen democracy by forming engaged and informed citizens. However, past studies find mixed evidence on the impact of years of schooling on political participation. We posit that the impact of schooling will depend on the content of education. The evidence for our argument comes from a study of a national primary school curriculum reform in Mexico under the PRI regime and its long-term impact on individual voting behavior. Analyses of the entire corpus of primary school textbooks from 1960 to 2000 using content analysis and automated text analysis shows that, for decades, school textbooks characterized the PRI regime as a democracy and placed heavy emphasis on teaching future citizens that their most important civic duty was to vote. However, when electoral support for the PRI began to erode, the regime reformed the curriculum to reduce the importance given to democracy and voting. Difference-in-differences estimates of the long-run impact of this reform using unique administrative records of voting behavior show that exposure to the reformed curriculum during primary school reduced the propensity to vote during adulthood. Our results show that education systems are a key policy tool that enable autocratic regimes to have enduring effects even after their collapse, and highlight the importance of the curriculum for shaping political outcomes.

Authors

• Agustina S. Paglayan, UCSD

• Francisco Garfias, University of California, San Diego