Skeptical Democrats? The Effects of Education for All Policies on Political Behavior in India

Listen to podcast (in conversation with Bilal Baloch, CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow)

About the Speaker:
Emmerich Davies is an Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a co-convener of the Brown-Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics. He works on the political economy of education with a regional focus on South Asia. He is interested in the effects of education on citizen-state relations, political participation and socialization, and the effects of the growth of private education in low-income democracies. His work has been accepted for publication in Comparative Political Studies. Read more about his research and teaching at www.scholar.harvard.edu/emda

About the Lecture:
One of the strongest findings in political science is that educated citizens participate politically more. However, these findings emerge largely out of advanced Western democracies and they remain untested in the Global South, with uncertain mechanisms in poorer democracies. In this seminar, Emmerich Davies leverages the expansion of educational opportunities to estimate the impact of increased schooling on political attitudes and behaviors. He finds that the program induced individuals to stay in school for one additional year, and an 18 percent higher level of English proficiency. This increased human capital, however, results in political disengagement. Individuals that attained higher levels of schooling as a result of the program are found to be less trusting of public institutions.