Does Higher Education Cause Political Participation? : Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design
Year: 2013
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Education has been considered by political economy and political science literature one of the most important factors explaining political participation: voter turnout, civic engagement, political knowledge, and democratic attitudes. However, only few papers have explored the causal link with contradictory findings. In this paper, I use the eligibility criteria for two loan programs in Chile, to perform a regression discontinuity designs that produce an exogenous variation on higher education enrollment, to test the causal effects on political participation. Using administrative individual data from the universe of voters, I find evidence that the re-lationship is statistically zero. Moreover, the relationship is zero when the data is analyzed by income, sex or by different background measures. Additionally, a survey from a repre-sentative sample of the population indicates that higher education do not cause changes in attitudes towards democracy, political knowledge, participation in demonstrations or in civic organizations, but causes overreporting on voting registration.
Author: Alex Solís
Institution: Uppsala University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1506448735