Does Democracy Promote Education?

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine if, and under what conditions, democracy promotes education. The investigation is based on theoretical models where the level of income, income inequality and ethnical fractionalization are assumed to affect the impact democracy has on the level of education in a country. Based on panel data, regression analyses are performed with the level of education as the dependent variable. For quality purposes two separate measurements are used for the democracy and education variables respectively. The empirical results support the relationship between secondary school enrollment rate and democracy while government spending on education shows little correlation with democracy. Further, the results indicate that low income levels in a country lowers the effect democracy has on education.