How school reforms reveal education's true power over voting and civic life
Researchers have found a new way to measure whether education actually changes how people participate in democracy—by studying policy changes that affect some students but not others. The method could help policymakers and education systems understand which reforms actually boost voting, community engagement, and democratic values.
Originaltitel: Educational reforms as natural experiments for studying the effects of education on political participation, civic skills and civic values
<p>Causal effects of education are notoriously challenging to establish, as is discussed in many of the contributions in this <em>Handbook</em>. These challenges relate to the effects of education on the individual level as well as to the effects of macro-level educational institutions. Against this backdrop, educational reforms represent an attractive approach for more reliably identifying the causal effects of education. By comparing individuals who are affected and unaffected by an educational reform in a country, many of the typical confounders of education can be kept constant, for example, family background on the individual level, but also country-level factors such as democratic institutions. Reforms may involve, for instance, prolonging compulsory schooling or altering tracking institutions. Research exploiting educational reforms has recently made substantial progress. This chapter discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the reform approach, offers advice for how to exploit reforms empirically, and reviews the state of scholarship relying on educational reforms for studying educational effects on democratic dispositions. The chapter covers effects on outcomes such as political participation, support for democratic values, tolerance and trust in people and political institutions. The literature review separates studies of reforms inducing prolonged education in democracies, studies of institutional reforms in democracies, and studies of autocratic reforms.</p>