Person:

Campante, Filipe

We provide evidence that economic circumstances are a key intermediating variable for understanding the relationship between schooling and political protest. Using the World Values Survey, we find that individuals with higher levels of schooling, but whose income outcomes fall short of that predicted by their biographical characteristics, in turn display a greater propensity to engage in protest activities. We discuss a number of interpretations that are consistent with this finding, including the idea that economic conditions can affect how individuals trade off the use of their human capital between production and political activities. Our results could also reflect a link between education, “grievance”, and political protest, although we argue that this is unlikely to be the sole explanation. Separately, we show that the interaction between schooling and economic conditions matters too at the country level: Rising education levels coupled with macroeconomic weakness are associated with increased incumbent turnover, as well as subsequent pressures toward democratization.

We investigate how the link between individual schooling and political participation is affected by country characteristics. We introduce a focus on a set of variables - namely factor endowments - which influence the relative productivity of human capital in political versus production activities. Using micro data on individual behavior, we find that political participation is more responsive to schooling in land-abundant countries, and less responsive in human capital-abundant countries, even while controlling for country political institutions and cultural attitudes. We develop these ideas in a model where individuals face an allocation decision over the use of their human capital. A relative abundance of land (used primarily in the least skill-intensive sector) or a scarcity of aggregate human capital will increase both the level of political participation and its responsiveness to schooling, by lowering the opportunity cost of production income foregone. In an extension, we further consider the problem of how much schooling a utility-maximizing ruler would choose to provide. An abundance of land tends to increase political participation ex post, and hence will lead the ruler to discourage human capital accumulation, a prediction for which we nd broad support in the cross-country data. Our model thus offers a framework which jointly explains patterns of political participation at the individual level and differences in public investment in education at the country level.

We investigate the relationship between corruption and political stability, understood as the likelihood of the incumbent being able to implement his preferred policies over time. We propose a model driven by two effects: The horizon effect, according to which more instability leads the incumbent to be more corrupt during his short window of opportunity; and the demand effect, by which the private sector is more willing to bribe more stable incumbents. The former effect dominates for low values of stability, since firms are unwilling to pay high bribes, but the latter effect prevails in highly stable regimes. This U-shaped pattern is confirmed by the cross-country evidence as well as several case studies: Countries or political regimes with very high or very low levels of stability display higher corruption, when compared to those in an intermediate range of stability. We also find evidence that corruption is U-shaped with respect to the size of government, confirming one of the corollaries of our model.