Mass Education Provision and Teachers’ Activism in Cross-National Perspective

• In Event: Political Mobilization and State Formation in Postcolonial Societies

Abstract

Research on the mass expansion of education in autocracies and post-colonial contexts centers how incumbents strategize the targeting of education provision or how this provision shapes students’ political behavior. This paper probes an under-theorized pathway through which the mass expansion of education shapes national politics: through the hiring of public-school teachers. When incumbents seek to universally enroll students in public education, teachers quickly become the state’s largest category of public employees even as the relative standing of the profession declines. Using existing databases of waves of contentious action cross-nationally (MMAD and NAVCO 3.0), I first present descriptive data on the regularity with which public school teachers’ organizations have joined in anti-government protests. I pair this cross-national data with twin studies of the drivers of teachers’ activism in the 2011 Tunisian revolution and in recent waves of anti-government mobilization in Iran. This paper highlights tradeoffs for incumbents seeking to expand education and generates theory on how incumbents manage these tradeoffs.

Author

• Elizabeth Parker-Magyar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology