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1 results

  • 7 - How Do the Educated Govern?

  • from Part II - Political Inequality and Representation
  • Edited by Noam Lupu, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, Jonas Pontusson, Université de Genève
  • Book:
    Unequal Democracies
    Published online:
    07 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023, pp 156-176
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  • Summary

    Do highly educated politicians adopt different public policies than less-educated politicians? Existing research disagrees about this question. While some recent studies argue that highly educated politicians deliver better performance, others find no effects of education on economic or public policy outcomes. This article studies this question using a comprehensive dataset with information about the education, age, and gender of elected local politicians in Spain and fine-grained economic and fiscal data collected between 2003 and 2011. Applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we find that when parties with more-educated councilors narrowly win the election, governments do not perform better on a number of valence indicators. However, further analyses reveal that local governments led by more-educated politicians have lower levels of capital spending and capital transfers per capita. Our findings suggest that educated and noneducated politicians differ on preferences rather than on ability and call into question that education can be used as a proxy of the “quality” of politicians.