Quasi-experimental evidence on the political impacts of education in Vietnam

ABSTRACT

This paper estimates the causal effects of education on political concern and political participation in Vietnam by employing the 1991 compulsory schooling reform to instrument for plausibly exogenous changes in education. The paper finds that, in general, education does cause favorable impacts on political outcomes. In particular, one more year of schooling, on average, results in increases in the probabilities of political concern and political participation by about 6–12 percentage points and 6–8 percentage points, respectively. This paper significantly provides suggestive evidence on the role of education in explaining political behaviors using the developing country context.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• political outcomes
• Vietnam

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• D72
• I21

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank valuable comments and suggestions from Yu-Wei Luke Chu, Nghi Truong, Cuong Viet Nguyen, Pham Khanh Nam and participants at the Small Talks Big Ideas (STBI) Seminar at School of Economics, University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City (UEH). I am also grateful to the editor and two referees for useful comments and suggestions. Errors are only mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Thang Dang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9736-8447

Notes

1. The RDD has been widely applied in applied economics as an identification strategy for causal inference (Luyten 2006; Kyriakides and Luyten 2009).

2. These rations are calculated by dividing the gross number of students enrolled in school, which may include students of late enrollment, early enrollment, or grade repetition in addition to the right school-age students, by the total population, which only includes children of the official school-age. Therefore, using such a calculating approach may lead to the ratios greater than 100% as shown.

3. However, the literature arguably finds that all educational levels are by no means causally linked to increases in political outcomes (Tenn 2007; Kam and Palmer 2008; Berinsky and Lenz 2011). In other words, whether schooling produces positive impacts on political outcomes depends on types or levels of education (Pelkonen 2012).

4. We can fully access the WVS datasets from http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org.