Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper explores the relationship between the expansion of free primary education and political participation in sub-Saharan Africa. Modernization theory suggests that as citizens become more educated, countries will become more democratic. Thus far, this and similar theories have been tested primarily in developed country contexts. I use a natural experiment to test whether this holds true in the African context. I exploit the implementation of school fee abolishment policies, a common policy intervention under the global Education for All agenda, as an exogenous source of variation that dramatically expanded access to primary education on the continent in the 1990s and early 2000s to test whether education impacts political behavior. Using an instrumental variable model, I compare the political participation of cohorts who would have benefitted from increased access to schooling due to school fee abolishment to cohorts who were just too old to have done so. To capture partial treatment effects of those of primary school age at the time of the policy change, I vary treatment dosage by the length of time a cohort was likely to have benefitted from free education. My analysis uses data from the Afrobarometer survey and includes 14 countries over time. I examine multiple forms of political participation including voting, attending community meetings, and following the news. The analysis is disaggregated by gender, employment status, levels of poverty, as well as country, and finds that, on average, more education does not lead to increased political participation in sub-Saharan Africa and, in some cases, is associated with decreased participation. This is consistent with earlier findings from Croke et al. (2016) on Zimbabwe and is the first to examine this relationship on the African continent for multiple countries over time. Future stages of this work will attempt to explore the mechanisms and nuances behind this relationship, including qualitative case studies and content analysis of country policies and national curriculums.