State Building, Elite Ideology, and Mass Schooling: The Formation of Education Leviathans Since the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Why do some states develop highly centralized education systems while other states develop education systems that are less centralized? This dissertation presents a theory of the development of mass education to explain variation in the degree to which states monopolize control over public education at the central level of government. The project develops a theoretical framework of the political dynamics that influence the timing and centralization of public education during state-building, and derives a set of hypotheses that are tested using statistical techniques and comparative historical analysis. In particular, two factors are highlighted: the subnational distribution of central state capacity, or infrastructural power, and the deployment of ideas by political elites to mobilize support for state-controlled public education. In the context of state formation, in which policy decisions often occur in an environment rife internal instability and scarce resources, both infrastructural power and elite ideas help resolve uncertainty over whether mass education as a state (and nation) building project will contribute to legitimacy and political order. States introduce mass education to delimit the boundaries of citizenship, inculcate dominant values, and (re)produce social and economic relations. Ruling elites in particular value centrally-governed mass education as a means to legitimate their political authority, but they face material and political constraints in pursuit of its development. During early phases of state-building, regimes trade off between investing in the regulated provision of education or consolidating military and fiscal capacity to ensure political survival. Given that education systems are highly information-intensive institutions and logistically complex to govern from the political center and yield longer-term benefits for state legitimacy, centralized mass education is a costly trade-off relative to other state-building projects. First, absent sufficient monitoring and enforcement capabilities, rulers’ efforts to impose `education-from-above' risks provoking political conflict with subnational actors. The state requires the necessary infrastructural power to collect and disseminate complex information about the population (i.e. informational capacity) before the regime can centralize control over education. However, state capacity may not be evenly distributed throughout the national territory. The more evenly distributed the infrastructural power of the state, the more likely that the central state will monopolize control over education. The project introduces a composite measure of centralized education based on an original historical dataset of laws, decrees, and institutions in forty-five countries in Europe and the Americas from 1800 to 1970. The results provide strong supportive evidence of the relationship between education centralization and the distribution of infrastructural power---specifically, the administration of national population censuses over time. Second, elite ideologies also contribute to divergent levels of education centralization between states, even those with similar levels of infrastructural power. This study examines the cases of Argentina and Chile. The historical evidence shows that intellectual elites in both countries engaged in political entrepreneurship in order to steer the central government's state-building priorities. In the case of Argentina, state-sponsored primary education emerged early as a critical component of consolidating political order in the liberal nationalist discourse of influential elites. By contrast, Chilean political thought prioritized state-sponsored, but elite-centered secondary and university education as more important for political order. In the Chilean case, elite consensus prioritized maintaining traditional social institutions as a means to construct the masses as citizen-subjects. As a consequence, Argentina's education system consolidated as more centralized than Chile's by 1900 despite the more rapid development of state capacity and political centralization that took place in the latter during the first half of the 19th century.