Nation-Building and Education

Democracies and dictatorships have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenise the population, i.e., ‘to build a nation’. We study and compare nation-building policies under the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a model where the type of government and borders of the country are endogenous. We find that the threat of democratisation provides the strongest incentive to homogenise. We focus upon a specific nation-building policy: mass primary education. We offer historical discussions of nation-building across time and space, and provide correlations for a large sample of countries over the 1925–2014 period.