Political science has long viewed education as an instrumental factor in developing support for democracy and beneficial for democratization. However, governments, both democratic and authoritarian, have substantial control over the curriculum and develop education institutions with the specific aim to instill in students the norms and values that underpin the regime. With this in mind, this study asks, does the effect of education vary by the political regime in which education was undertaken? We use a quasi-experimental approach exploiting European compulsory schooling reforms, implemented under both democratic and authoritarian regimes, to answer this question. We find that education has no effect on principle and functional support for democracy, but that education’s effect on satisfaction with democracy is conditional on regime type. For those educated under a democratic regime, education led to greater satisfaction with democracy, whereas those educated under an authoritarian regime became less satisfied with democracy.

The study of popular support for authoritarian regimes has long relied on the assumption that respondents provide truthful answers to surveys. However, when measuring regime support in closed political systems there is a distinct risk that individuals are less than forthright due to fear that their opinions may be made known to the public or the authorities. In order to test this assumption, we conducted a novel web-based survey in China in which we included four list experiments of commonly used items in the comparative literature on regime support. We find systematic bias for all four measures; substantially more individuals state that they support the regime with direct questioning than when presented with our indirect list experiments. The level of self-censorship, which ranges from 24.5 to 26.5 percentage points, is considerably higher than previously thought. Self-censorship is further most prevalent among the wealthy, urban, female and younger respondents.

Authoritarian regimes throughout the world expand their educationsystems in an effort to appease citizens and promote economic growth. Scholarsof China argue that this strategy allows the regime to enjoy a high level of publicsupport. Yet, a vast modernization literature argues for the democratizingpotential of education. These two diverging theoretical predictions raise aninteresting empirical question, what effect does education have on individual-level support for authoritarian rule? I leverage an expansion in higher educationin China as an identification strategy to study the effect of education reformon two measures of support for authoritarian rule: support for governmentcensorship and trust in the central government. While the reform openedmillions of positions in higher education, it also resulted in high graduateunemployment, and a general decrease in perceived quality. I find that highereducation reform led to a substantial decrease in regime support. The negativeeffect of the reform was strongest among cohorts that entered the weakestlabour markets in the year of their graduation and therefore were most likelyto be unemployed. I further find that education reform had an effect on valuesassociated with procedural democracy in that it is associated with an increasedbelief in citizen participation, but that there was no effect on values associatedwith broader definitions of democracy such as social trust and tolerance.

Prior research has consistently identified education as an important correlate of political knowledge, which, many argue, reflects an underlying causal relationship. However, recent work has questioned this interpretation rather arguing that family background causes one to both obtain an education and to develop political knowledge. I argue that this causal-versus-proxy debate is too simplistic. Specifically, using a sample of identical twins, I test the interaction between education, political discussion in the home, and political knowledge. I find that education is positively associated with political knowledge independent of family background and genetics for those who discussed politics with family relatively little during upbringing. However, for those who discussed politics with family members more frequently, education has no association with political knowledge independent of pre-adult factors. Therefore, education compensates for a lack of exposure to political content in the home.