When Does Education Promote Democracy? Evidence from Curriculum Reforms in Mexico, 1960-2010

Abstract: Studies of the impact of education on political participation find mixed results. We ask whether the effect of education on adult political participation depends on the content of the education that we were exposed to. To study this, we begin by using structural topic models and qualitative text analysis tools to identify changes over time and across states in the content of all the primary school textbooks used in Mexico from 1960 onward. This enables us to identify how the emphasis placed on teaching students about democracy changed both over time and across states. We then combine this information about the timing of textbook reforms with individual-level data on political participation drawn from administrative records, and use difference-in-differences to estimate the effect of primary school textbooks on an individual's propensity to vote, their likelihood to voluntarily monitor elections, and other forms of political participation.