TY - JOUR
T1 - Higher Education as an Authoritarian Tool for Regime Survival
T2 - Evidence from Kazakhstan and around the World
AU - Hanson, Margaret
AU - Sokhey, Sarah Wilson
N1 - Funding Information:
For their helpful comments and suggestions, we would like to thank the participants in the 2018 conference at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia) including Hilary Appel, Dmitry Dubrovsky, Vladimir Gimpelson, Israel Marques, Thomas Remington, Fabian Slonimczyk, Sasha de Vogel, Andrei Yakovlev, and Amanda Zadorian. We would also like to thank Jeffrey Nonnemacher for his helpful comments, Pavel Bacovsky for his help with data collection, and two anonymous reviwers whose feedback has made the paper much stronger.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Authoritarian leaders face a dilemma in choosing whether to fund higher education: risk promoting educated students who are more likely to protest, or increase human capital and promote economic growth? We argue that autocrats invest in higher education to gain the support of those in the middle and upper-classes when there is a large public sector. Panel data analysis confirms this hypothesis, but offers limited insight into why. We examine the Kazakh case to better understand the causal mechanisms at play. The evidence is strongly suggestive that higher education can be an important part of the authoritarian toolbox.
AB - Authoritarian leaders face a dilemma in choosing whether to fund higher education: risk promoting educated students who are more likely to protest, or increase human capital and promote economic growth? We argue that autocrats invest in higher education to gain the support of those in the middle and upper-classes when there is a large public sector. Panel data analysis confirms this hypothesis, but offers limited insight into why. We examine the Kazakh case to better understand the causal mechanisms at play. The evidence is strongly suggestive that higher education can be an important part of the authoritarian toolbox.
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U2 - 10.1080/10758216.2020.1734839
DO - 10.1080/10758216.2020.1734839
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85083593705
SN - 1075-8216
VL - 68
SP - 231
EP - 246
JO - Problems of Post-Communism
JF - Problems of Post-Communism
IS - 3
ER -