Are There Civic Returns to Education?

Are There Civic Returns to Education? " …since the achievement of American Independence, the universal and ever-repeated argument in favor of Free Schools has been, that the general intelligence which they are capable of diffusing, and which can be imparted by no other human instrumentality, is indispensable to a republican form of government. " Horace Mann (1846) INTRODUCTION Economists typically justify the government's extensive and varied involvement in the market for education by appealing to distributional concerns and several types of market failures. The most frequently discussed types of market failure involve the positive externalities that might be associated with schooling. For example, some have argued that education generates external social benefits by reducing the prevalence of crime and by promoting knowledge spillovers and technology diffusion in the workplace.1 However, the externality that is arguably featured most prominently in discussions about education involves civic behaviors and attitudes. Specifically, it is widely believed that education is an essential component of a stable democratic society because it encourages citizens to participate in democratic processes and prepares them to do so in an informed and intelligent manner. The putative existence of such civic returns to education motivated the proliferation of common schools in the early 19 th century and early educational reformers like Horace Mann and continues to provide one of the most important justifications for the many public policies and institutions that promote access to all levels of education. An extensive, empirical literature in political science has documented a strong correlation between educational attainment and various civic behaviors. In particular, this literature has demonstrated that higher levels of schooling are associated with substantive increases in voter turnout. Political scientists generally interpret this literature as providing strong support for the view that education is effective at promoting the quantity and quality of civic participation. However, these correlations could actually be quite misleading since both schooling and civic outcomes are simultaneously influenced by a wide variety of inherently unobservable traits specific to individuals and the families and communities in which they were reared. For example, individuals who grew up in cohesive families and communities that stressed civic responsibility may also be more likely to remain in school. The plausible existence of such unobservables implies that conventionally estimated correlations may spuriously overstate the true civic returns to education.2 This study attempts to construct less ambiguous empirical evidence on this policy-relevant issue by identifying the causal …