Do Colleges Breed Revolutionaries? Education and Political Participation in China
نویسنده
چکیده
Modernization theorists believe that education empowers citizens to take collective action to challenge authoritarian rule. I argue that education in most authoritarian countries is government run, and that authoritarian governments have enormous incentives to shape the form and content of education in their favor. In post-Tiananmen China, the government has used propaganda, control, and recruitment to contain collective action on university campuses. I report the first quasi-experimental evidence in a noncompetitive authoritarian regime to challenge the modernization view. Exploiting China’s college expansion reform as a natural experiment, I show that higher education only has a positive effect on people’s individualistic, expressive behavior, but has no effect on collective action. I also find that China’s college graduates do not differ from the less educated in a range of political attitudes, such as demand for political rights. These findings call into question previous theoretical and practical emphasis on education’s empowering effect in non-democracies. ∗Yuhua Wang is Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University ([email protected]. edu). I would like to thank the Research Center for Contemporary China at Peking University, especially Shen Mingming, Yang Ming, Yan Jie, and Chai Jingjing, for designing and implementing the Chinese Citizens Awareness Survey, and Professor Feng Shizheng at People’s University for sharing the Beijing Colleges Panel Study data. Liz Perry, Horacio Larreguy, Torben Iversen, Peter Hall, Melanie Cammett, Susan Pharr, Dali Yang, Haifeng Huang, Xi Song, Tia Thornton and seminar participants at Harvard, Chicago, and AAS have provided helpful comments. All errors remain my own.
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