Bringing Down the Educational Wall Political Regimes, Ideology, and the Expansion of Education

Bringing Down the Educational Wall studies the causes of educational expansion in a global sample of developing and developed countries from 1960 to 2005. The book explores how the interaction between the economic context of nations (economic development and inequality) and political factors (the type of political regime and the ideology of dictatorships) influences countries' educational outcomes. The book's main contributions are the exploration of ideological differences between autocratic regimes and the tracing of changes in different parts of the income distribution, which accounts for education expanding to broad sectors of the population. Bringing Down the Educational Wall introduces a new database on the ideology of dictatorships and uses quantitative methods and case analyses to test its theoretical arguments. This work will help students in comparative politics and political economy courses to develop their understanding of redistributive policies and the effects of political factors on the expansion of education.

1. Introduction; 2. The institutional link; 3. Tracing the impact of political regimes; 4. The ideology of dictatorships; 5. Political regimes, economic development and the expansion of education; 6. Political regimes and education policies. Case analysis; 7. The impact of inequality on education; Conclusion.

Dulce Manzano is Associate Professor of Sociology at Universidad Complutense, Madrid. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the area of political economy and comparative politics at the Juan March Institute, Madrid, has a Ph.D. in Political Science (2007) and is a doctoral member of the Juan March Institute. She has been a Visiting Scholar at New York University with the financial support of national grants (Ramón Areces and Caja Madrid Foundations). Her work has been published in Comparative European Politics, South European Society and Politics, and Political Studies, and she is the author of Democracia, Instituciones y Política Económica (with José Fernández-Albertos, 2010).