Democracy and Education: Does the Type of Government Affect Access to Education?

In this article, I seek to find whether the type of government in a country affects the amount of education provided. To do this, I propose a model where political power is distributed throughout the population, and their choice to support a government is based on an observable factor; whether the government provides access to education. Using the results from this model, I propose 3 hypotheses: that post-primary education enrollment will remain constant with changes in governance; that primary education enrollment will increase with an increase in democracy; and that the effect democracy has on primary education enrollment will be greater in predominantly rural countries than in predominantly urban countries. I test these hypotheses using data from Africa between 1990 and 2008. Due to the results from the empirical analysis, I fail to reject the first two hypotheses. Furthermore, I find inconclusive results for the third hypothesis.