Education and Revolutionary Destabilization Risks: A Quantitative Analysis

Abstract

There is a significant number of theoretical studies linking education and socio-political destabilization. At the same time, there is an almost complete absence of global quantitative cross-national studies analyzing the impact of education on the risks of revolutionary uprisings. This research is aimed to fill the existing gap. The existing literature shows that education contributes to the accumulation of human capital, develops a culture of discussion and tolerance, and makes people more susceptible to liberal democratic values. On the one hand, these factors raise the population’s expectations of and demands on the authorities. On the other hand, they increase the relative costs of participating in any type of demonstrations. In this regard, it is hypothesized that formal education enrollment: (1) will reduce the likelihood of armed revolutionary campaigns, which are associated with greater risks and uncertainty for participants, but (2) will be curvilinearly correlated to the risks of unarmed campaigns, since in the early and active stages of modernization there will be a positive relationship, while in the most developed countries it will be negative. Accordingly, it follows that education in general is negatively associated with any revolutionary actions. The analysis uses 10,350 observations (with 387 revolutionary events) from 1950 to 2019, based on extended-release NAVCO data and a combination of the Barro and Lee Education Research Project with information from the UNDP (with cross-validation on the basis of the authors’ own database). The main research methods were cross-tabulation and correlation-regression analyses with the construction of probability functions.