Working Paper: NBER ID: w18839
Authors: Alberto Alesina; Paola Giuliano; Bryony Reich
Abstract: Nations stay together when citizens share enough values and preferences and can communicate with each other. Democracies and dictatorships have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenize the population, i.e. “to build a nation”. We study and compare nation-building policies under the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a model where the location and type of government and the borders of the country are endogenous. We find that the threat of democratization provides the strongest incentive to homogenize. We focus upon a specific nation-building policy: the provision of mass primary education. As a motivation, we offer historical discussions of several episodes in the nineteenth century and suggestive correlations for a large sample of countries over the 1925-2014 period.
Keywords: nationbuilding; education; democracy; dictatorship; political regimes
JEL Codes: F3
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| threat of democratization (D72) | homogenization policies (R28) |
| homogenization policies (R28) | mass education (I20) |
| threat of democratization (D72) | mass education (I20) |
| secure nondemocratic regime (P26) | little motivation to homogenize (D29) |
| higher threat of democracy (D72) | increased efforts in indoctrination and education (I29) |
| regime change likelihood (P27) | educational reforms (I28) |