Schooling and Electoral Accountability in the Developing World

For years, promoters of democracy have focused their attention on designing institutions that facilitate the practice of democracy. In that sense, they have assigned more importance to mechanisms than actors. Yet democracy cannot function without the consent of participating citizens. Democracy requires support from the elites, but also from the masses. Accordingly, authors have proposed that schooling broadens the scope of citizens, giving them tools to better integrate tolerance, giving them perspective with regards to extremist or monolithic ideologies, and allowing them to make more rational electoral decisions. These authors have gone as far as to conclude that schooling is likely a “necessary” condition for democracy. To this day, empirical tests of this hypothesis have been limited to plurinational comparisons that measure the degree of covariation between national school attendance statistics and indices of democratic maturity. Hitherto, the theoretical foundations of the hypothesis are clearly located at the individual level. The analysis proposed in this article explores the hypothesis with the use of individual-level data from several developing countries. The objective is to address the following questions: To what extent is the propensity of citizens to blame governments for their poor economic performance affected by schooling? What are the implications of individual-level behavior at the systemic level? In responding to these questions we propose to highlight the role of schooling in the democratic process.