Public Schooling, Indoctrination, andTotalitarianism

John R. Lott, Jr.Yale University

Governments use public education and public ownership of themedia to control the information that their citizens receive. Moretotalitarian governments as well as those with larger wealth trans-fers make greater investments in publicly controlled information.This finding is borne out from cross-sectional time-series evidenceacross countries and is confirmed when the recent fall of commu-nism is specifically examined. My results reject the standard public-good view linking education and democracy, and I find evidencethat public educational expenditures vary in similar ways to govern-ment ownership of television stations. Country-level data on theorganization of families as well as data on South African publicschools are also examined.

I. Introduction

The standard public-good argument for education assumes that abetter-educated populace is more likely to support democracy. Thispresupposes either that more educated people are inclined to makedecisions for themselves or that education inherently instills the be-lief that democracy is desirable (Cohn 1979, p. 206; Solmon 1982,p. 8). These arguments largely depend on the level of marketablehuman capital, such as literacy and reasoning ability, and ignore thequestion of methods: subsidies versus public provision. Yet politicians

I would like to thank Gertrud Fremling, Victor Fuchs, Sam Peltzman, Eric Posner,Mark Ramseyer, an unusually helpful referee, and the participants at the symposiumin honor of Gary S. Becker’s 65th birthday and a seminar at the University of Chica-go’s Law School and Department of Economics for their helpful comments. I wouldalso like to acknowledge my appreciation for the funding I received from the LawSchool’s John M. Olin Law and Economics Fellowship program.

[Journal of Political Economy, 1999, vol. 107, no. 6, pt. 2] 1999 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-3808/1999/10706S-0016$02.50

S127

S128 journal of political economy

in more totalitarian countries should wish to avoid creating a moreindependent and critically reasoning constituency. Hence, the public-good explanation would imply a consistent negative relationship be-tween totalitarianism and expenditures on public schooling.1 I shallprovide evidence that this is not the relationship that we observe.

While many others have argued that public schooling may serveto indoctrinate (e.g., see surveys in Lott [1987c] and Sowell [1995]),2

this paper asks the following questions: What are the characteristicsof governments that have the greatest returns to indoctrination, aremore likely to own the media, and are in fact making larger invest-ments in public education? Are these governments also more likelyto exhibit the societal characteristics that make direct parentalinvolvement in their children’s lives more costly?

Governments have gone to great lengths to instill desired valuesin children. Yet it is not just Germany during the 1930s and 1940sor communist countries such as the former Soviet Union that haveactively tried to influence children’s views.3 A good example is Swe-den, which aggressively instituted a very costly system of nurseryschool care. When Ingvar Carlsson (who later became prime minis-ter) was education minister, he said that ‘‘school is the spearheadof Socialism’’ and ‘‘pre-school training is essential ‘to eliminate thesocial heritage’ ’’ of undesirable parental views (quoted in Huntford[1971, pp. 222, 233]). Swedish educational theorists even advocatedtax and government employment policies ‘‘to get both parents outof the home, so that children are forced out as well’’ (p. 222; seealso Rosen [1996]).

Section II briefly discusses why countries that are more totalitarianand create larger wealth transfers experience greater returns to in-

1 This argument implicitly makes the assumption that more educated people seedemocracy as a good. It is not readily apparent why this is necessarily true. Mayberelatively educated people, who are thus supposedly relatively wealthier, feel that amore totalitarian government is better equipped to protect their property.

2 For previous work on the formation of individual preferences/views, see Thomp-son and Ruther (1983), Lott (1990), Becker (1996), and Sunstein (1996). This litera-ture debates whether changing the cost of different types of information alters peo-ple’s preferences or whether these views are independent of these innatepreferences. For the discussion here this distinction is not crucial, though I shallassume, as in my 1984 dissertation, that changing the relative costs of different typesof information produces different views and not different underlying preferences.See also Becker and Murphy (1988) for related discussions.

3 For example, during the 1920s and 1950s, the Soviet Union experimented withraising children in ‘‘communal children’s houses, dining halls, and other institu-tions that would decrease the importance of the individual household’’ (Shipler1983, pp. 88–89). While fighting in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the Soviet govern-ment forcibly took tens of thousands of 3- and 4-year-old Afghanis to the USSR tobe raised away from the influences of their families (Amstutz 1986). The hope wasthat when later returned to Afghanistan they would form the core of a loyal govern-ment administration.

public schooling S129

doctrination. Section III updates statistical evidence comparing pri-mary and secondary school expenditures with public ownership oftelevision as well as public medical expenditures. The following sec-tions then test whether educational expenditures were influencedby the fall of communism (Sec. IV) and analyze how family structureas well as the amount of time in which children are removed fromtheir family changes with the type of government (Sec. V). Finally,Section VI uses teacher salaries by race in South Africa to analyzewhether the government was able to ‘‘buy’’ teachers’ support.

II. Outlining the Theory

In past work, I have offered an explanation as to why education waspublicly provided across all countries, starting with the assumptionthat political entrepreneurs maximize support by regulating the sizeand distribution of ‘‘wealth transfers’’ subject to the costs of creatingthe transfers (Becker 1976, 1983; Peltzman 1976). While largertransfers increase the opposition generated by net losers, politicianscan make investments in mitigating this opposition. Force is onesuch option, for example, by outlawing the organization of opposi-tion political parties or jailing opponents (‘‘totalitarianism’’). Butcontrolling the information received by citizens (‘‘indoctrination’’)can also be effective. When the cost of protransfer information fallsand that of antitransfer information rises, views more favorable tothe government are generated. The greater the perceived ‘‘legiti-macy’’ or ‘‘fairness’’ of existing transfers, the lower the opposition.Like public ownership of the news media, government-providedschooling decreases the cost of wealth transfers by changing the rela-tive cost of acquiring different information and predisposing stu-dents to support certain transfers. Educational subsidies are not aseffective as public schooling in instilling these views, because theincreased competition for students creates incentives for educatorsto provide the information that customers, but not authorities, value(Lott 1987a).

Building on Peltzman’s (1976) work, my model shows that publiceducational expenditures should increase with ‘‘totalitarianism’’ aswell as with government transfers (Lott 1990, pp. 201–8). The modelassumes that totalitarianism has two effects: (1) it increases the costof organizing opposition groups, but (2) it restricts the opportunityset of individuals and hence lowers their real wealth, and this worksto increase the level of opposition.4 The effectiveness of totalitarian-

4 These restrictions on people’s opportunity sets can take many forms, such aslimiting where individuals may go or with whom they may associate. Presumablysuch force is used only because it alters people’s opportunity set.

S130 journal of political economy

ism in deterring effective opposition increases at a decreasing rate,whereas as a result of diminishing marginal utility of wealth, opposi-tion created by these restrictions increases at an increasing rate.Higher levels of totalitarianism produce diminishing returns to con-trolling the citizenry through force and increase the marginal returnto indoctrination. The model also predicts that as a country’s in-come increases, the opposition arising from any given level of totali-tarianism falls, and thus the return to indoctrination also falls. Thispaper uses Freedom House’s Comparative Survey of Freedom indexon political freedom and civil liberties to measure totalitarianism.The components of the index5 measure many different costs of op-position ranging from the existence of multiple political parties tofairness of vote tabulation to military control.

The return to investments in indoctrination should also be relatedto the level of governmental wealth transfers. As wealth transfers in-crease and opposition rises, the marginal return to indoctrinationalso rises. Since all government actions create some wealth transfers,I assume that government size proxies for the level of transfers.

The tests attempt to examine how investments in indoctrina-tion change with the type of government. Unfortunately, directmeasures of educational expenditures on indoctrination are notavailable. As a substitute, total public educational expenditures(which consist of investments in both human capital and indoc-trination) are regressed on totalitarianism, government size, andother variables explaining investments in human capital, such as in-come. The theory is then tested by studying other similar types ofgoods, for example, television broadcasting, which provides knowl-edge but also may be used for indoctrination. If government controlof television increases with totalitarianism or wealth transfers, it ismore plausible that such a relationship also holds for education.6

5 These components include the following: (1) Are multiple political parties (orother means by which opposition to government policy may be organized) allowed?(2) Is candidacy reasonably open? (3) Is there fair polling or tabulation of votes?(4) Have the country’s most important leaders been recently elected? (5) Does theopposition attain local or regional office? (6) Is the government free of military andforeign control? (7) Does the rule of law exist (including the independence of thejudiciary and the legitimacy of policy behavior)? (8) Is there open public discussionof issues before the country? (9) Is there freedom from political censorship? (10)Are the media independent of the government? (Public ownership is definitely notone of the components of the index. For example, Sweden’s broadcast medium ispublicly owned but is defined as independent of direct government control sinceit is an independent public corporation and staffing appointments are not politi-cal appointments.)

6 Given the long-run returns to instilling certain values in children, a questionarises as to how democratically elected politicians can internalize the returns to theseinvestments. One answer is provided by Alchian (1950), Becker (1976), and Brennanand Buchanan (1980), who argue that efficiency alone, without a consciously

public schooling S131

Where data are available, measures of political stability are exam-ined.

III. Schooling, Wealth Transfers, andTotalitarianism: Some Evidence

A. Government Control of Television

Few people would be surprised that totalitarian governments favorgovernment ownership of television. Under private provision, li-cense revocation or the threat of revocation could be used to influ-ence programming, though it probably does not constitute a perfectsubstitute for direct ownership (e.g., Klein, Crawford, and Alchian1978). I thus predict a positive relation between ownership and total-itarianism. To test my hypothesis, I ran the following probit regres-sion pooling data for 1985 and 1987:government ownership of TV i

! c " b1 totalitarianism rating i

" b2 real per capita GDPi(1)

" b3!government expenditures

GDP "i

" b4 (totalitarianism rating # real per capita GDP)i

" b4 year dummy 1987 " ui .

planned process involved, can explain why ‘‘rules of thumb’’ and institutions areadopted. Institutions that have the lowest costs of transferring wealth produce themost political support and are the least likely to be challenged. If an efficiency expla-nation exists for public schooling (e.g., it lowers the cost of creating transfers), pub-lic provision can be explained with ‘‘as if’’ statements concerning human motiva-tions. Long-lived, strong political parties that punish politicians who fail to supportinvestments in indoctrination may also solve this problem. Yet two other mechanismsbesides strong political parties can ensure that society internalizes the effects of in-doctrination. First, the constituencies that receive these long-term benefits couldsupport only politicians who vote to inculcate the desired values. Second, if politi-cians are ideologues, as assumed in Lott (1987b) and Lott and Bronars (1993), thepoliticians not only value producing current support but also value the transfersthey create. The assumption that ideologues consume ‘‘having done the right thing’’can be easily extended to their intrinsically valuing education’s moral indoctrinationor the resulting future transfers. The greater the extent to which politicians valuethese moral beliefs or future transfers, the more they will internalize the returns tothese investments. Unlike investments in police, the investments in indoctrinationmay take a relatively long time to produce politically beneficial results and, as withany other capital, should continue to affect views even after the indoctrination stops.For instance, Stalin remained popular in Russia even though he no longer con-trolled the instruments of repression.

S132 journal of political economy

The term government ownership of TV denotes whether a country’stelevision stations are publicly (government TV ! 1) or privatelyowned (government TV ! 0).7 Which category, public or privatetelevision ownership, was judged on the basis of which type possessedthe most transmitting power and, when that was not available, bythe relative number of transmitters. Most countries have either com-plete government or complete private ownership.8

The totalitarianism index using the Freedom House’s Compara-tive Survey of Freedom index on political freedom and civil libertiesranges from values of two to 14 (both the political freedom and civilliberty variables separately range from one to seven), with highernumbers representing more totalitarianism.9 The ratio of govern-ment expenditures to the gross national product expressed as a per-centage proxies for the level of transfers. The term ‘‘real per capitagross domestic product’’ is measured in 1985 dollars and was ob-tained from Robert Summers and Alan Heston’s Penn World Ta-bles.10 Finally, the interactive term multiplies the level of totalitarian-ism by the per capita GDP. Table 1 shows the data’s means andstandard deviations.

As noted earlier, I expected the probability of government televi-sion ownership to increase with either increased totalitarianism orgovernment transfers and decrease with higher values of totalitarian-ism rating # real per capita GDP. Higher levels of government trans-fers might measure left-out variables, which increase governmentspending generally and can be described as a ‘‘taste’’ for public own-ership. Alternatively, the higher the level of net transfers in a coun-try, the greater the opposition produced and the higher the mar-ginal political product of an additional increment of indoctrination.Real per capita GDP is also included in the regression, though in

7 The countries used in this sample were Algeria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Ethiopia,Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Swaziland, Togo,Uganda, Tanzania, Zaire, Zambia, Canada, Costa Rica, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica,Panama, Saint Kitts, United States, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Venezuela, Bangla-desh, India, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Oman, Saudi Arabia,Singapore, Sri Lanka, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslova-kia, Denmark, Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Luxem-bourg, Malta, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, and USSR. A coupleof countries had two observations.

8 Given the available information for television, the ownership of transmittersseems virtually identical to the ownership of programming. With the advent of cabletelevision, many countries that previously had purely public ownership of transmit-ters now allow large portions of their populations to have access to many differentsources of programming.

9 For a discussion that parallels my use of these variables, see Milton Friedman’sdiscussion in Block (1991).

10 These tables are available from the National Bureau of Economic Research:www.nber.org.

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S134 journal of political economyTABLE 2

Government Ownership of Television and Totalitarianism: Establishingthe Relationship

Government Ownershipof Television

N ! 58 N ! 58 N ! 59Dependent Variable (1) (2) (3)

Totalitarianism rating .2887* .3037* .2038*(2.502) (2.332) (2.844)

GDP/population .0000866 .000152 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅(1.099) (.553)

GDP2/population ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ $3.24e-09 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅(.733)

Totalitarianism # (GDP/population) $7.60e-06 $9.05e-06 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅(1.498) (1.573)

Government expenditures/GDP .0342* .0331* .0378*(2.790) (2.673) (2.998)

Intercept $2.2312* $2.4371** $1.468**(2.059) (1.778) (1.778)

Pseudo R 2 .2944 .2956 .2720χ2 15.70 15.76 14.61

Note.—Probit regressions with χ2 values are shown in parentheses; year dummies are not shown.* Statistically significant at least at the 5 percent level.** Statistically significant at least at the 10 percent level.

contrast to my later estimates for education, its effect on governmentownership of television is ambiguous. It can be negative because withhigher incomes people want to purchase more private provision. Onthe other hand, it may be positive since increased levels of incomeimply more wealth to potentially redistribute.

Using data from 58 countries, equation (1) was estimated asshown in column 1 of table 2. The results all confirm the hypothesis.In all cases the coefficients have the expected sign, and they aresignificant for the totalitarianism rating or government transfers.Taking the derivative of this regression with respect to the level oftotalitarianism, I find that when real per capita GDP is less than$37,987, increases in totalitarianism raise the probability of govern-ment ownership. Since the highest real per capita GDP was $19,648for the United Arab Emirates, an increase in the totalitarianism rat-ing increases the probability of government ownership.11 Columns2 and 3 show that these results are not sensitive to the inclusion ofeither per capita GDP or the interactive term.

11 In fact, the mean value of real per capita income for all 121 countries for whichit could be obtained in 1987 was only $5,012.

public schooling S135

B. Totalitarianism and Expenditures on Schooling

As discussed earlier, the same relationship should hold for schoolingif totalitarian governments derive important benefits such as indoc-trination from public schooling. To test the relationship betweentotalitarianism and educational expenditures, I again use the modelshown in equation (1), with minor alterations. The first modificationis that the variable real current (i.e., noncapital) public educationalexpenditures per capita (in dollars) replaces government ownershipof television. The government transfers variable is replaced with a‘‘net government transfers’’ variable, government spending net oftotal school expenditures. This change removes some artificial col-linearity that would otherwise exist between government transfersand educational expenditures. The new specification is thus

current educational expenditures per capita i

! c " b5totalitarianism rating i " b6real per capita GDPi(2)

" b7 !government net of school expenditures

GDP "i

" b8(totalitarianism rating # real per capita GDP)i " u 2i .

A higher totalitarianism rating as well as higher government trans-fers should increase educational expenditures, whereas higher total-itarianism rating # real per capita GDP should reduce educationalexpenditures. However, in contrast to the regressions for televisionownership, higher per capita GDP should increase expenditures onschooling. I also included squared per capita GDP in some of thespecifications to account for any possible nonlinearity. Cross-sec-tional time-series data for 407 observations from 99 countries areavailable for the period 1985–92.12 Country effects as well as separatefixed year effects for each continent to allow for any variation intime trends were also included. The Freedom House index showsthat Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America wereall becoming freer over this eight-year period, with the largestchanges occurring in Europe (mainly because of the changes in thecommunist countries) and Africa, where the average country inthese two continents became freer by 3.1 and 2.5 points, respectively,over this period.

The estimates for equation (2) are shown in columns 1 and 2 of

12 Unfortunately, information for every country is not available for all years.

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public schooling S137

table 3.13 The results support neither the standard public-good argu-ment (discussed earlier) nor the hypothesis that democracies andtotalitarian regimes are equally inclined to instill support. All coeffi-cients have the expected sign and are significant at least at the 0.01percent level. According to the first specification, increases in totali-tarianism raise current public expenditures on schooling but onlyas long as real per capita GDP is less than $12,767. Of the 891 obser-vations for which real per capita GDP was available, 785 (87 percent)have lower values.14 The results provide only weak evidence that themarginal return to indoctrination is lower in wealthier countries.15

13 The countries used in this regression are Algeria, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Bu-rundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon,Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozam-bique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Swaziland, Togo,Tunisia, Uganda, Tanzania, Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Belize, Canada, Costa Rica,Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, Saint Kitts,Trinidad and Tobago, United States, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay,Suriname, Venezuela, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Japan, Jor-dan, Republic of Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia, Oman, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singa-pore, Sri Lanka, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria,Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Hungary,Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Swit-zerland, Yugoslavia, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu,and USSR.

14 This percentage is higher than in my previous study (Lott 1990), where thecorresponding percentage was 63 percent. See also Thompson and Ruther (1983).

15 The unavoidable use of proxy variables along with their inherent measurementerror raises an econometric concern: the model is underidentified since the set ofmaximum likelihood solutions contains more than one point. Measurement errorcauses no problem if the K reverse regressions all yield estimates of the same signon every variable with the direct regression. The maximum and minimum valuesfor a coefficient from this set of K " 1 estimates are consistent estimates of theendpoints of an interval that contains the true coefficients. Besides the possibilityof measurement error, these proxies are assumed to differ from the true values bysome unknown scaling factor, d. As long as the sign of d is known, the sign of thetrue coefficient can still be inferred, which is our real concern (Leamer 1978, pp.238–45). Unfortunately, the data do not produce direct and reverse regressionsagreeing in sign. For totalitarianism rating, the bounds are $116.5 and 1,302.59;real per capita GDP, $.04597 and 1.9176; net socialism, $7.77 and 218.8; and totali-tarianism rating # real per capita GDP, $.00208 and $.2577. Specifications withoutthe country dummy variables provide direct and reverse regressions agreeing in sign.The extreme estimates from these bounded sets indicate that in 1985 increases intotalitarianism increased current public expenditures on schooling at least for levelsof real per capita GDP up to $860 and possibly to $85,642. Of the 892 countries, 17percent (or 152) have real per capita GDPs less than $860, and even the midpointfor these bounds—$42,391—is more than two times greater than the highest levelof real per capita GDP in the sample. However, any estimates falling within thosebounds are all equally likely. Thus the data are unambiguous only for values of percapita real GDP below $860: in that range, increases in totalitarianism are associatedwith increased expenditures on schooling. No countries fall in the range in whichthe reverse is true.

Klepper and Leamer (1984) suggest one solution to this estimation problem: tointroduce additional information on the size of the R 2 that one would observe ifall the measurement error were removed. The lower one’s estimate of the model’s

S138 journal of political economy

Not only are the coefficients in the first specification of table 3statistically significant, but they also demonstrate the economicallylarge impact of totalitarianism over school expenditures. With themean income for the entire sample assumed to be $5,012, a one-standard-deviation change in the totalitarianism ranking increasesreal per capita current education expenditures by $144.21, a 0.25-standard-deviation change in educational expenditures and almost50 percent of its mean. By comparison, a one-standard-deviationchange in the government transfers variable implies a $161 increasein educational expenditures. However, the dominant influence oneducational expenditures is clearly per capita GDP, where, when themean totalitarianism ranking (7.976) is assumed, a one-standard-deviation change in personal GDP increases per capita current edu-cation expenditures by $377, an amount 2.6 times greater than asimilar change produced by the totalitarianism ranking.16

Columns 3 and 4 in table 3 report estimates with real current edu-cation expenditures per student. Despite missing data on the num-ber of students in many countries, the results remain similar to thosealready described. Further, the results imply that educational expen-ditures are a superior good since the squared term is positive. Theconclusions drawn from the other coefficients are basically unaf-fected. To test the public-good hypothesis, I also tried includingcountry population. However, educational expenditures declinedwith population, and the coefficients that we are focusing on wereslightly more statistically significant than what I already report.17

explanatory power in the absence of measurement error, the more likely that thecoefficient estimates can be bounded. For specification 1 in table 3, as long as thereader believes that in the absence of measurement error the model would notexplain more than 94 percent of the variation in current educational expenditures,the results are not affected by either measurement errors or problems with proxyvariables. As in Klepper and Leamer’s paper, as long as R *2 (the R 2 obtained withthis model when there is no measurement error) is less than R *2

m (the maximumvalue of R *2 consistent with all the normalized regressions in the same orthant),the parameter estimates will be bounded. The term R *2

m is defined by

R *2m ! R 2 " (1 $ R 2)min

ij #$1 $ !B ij

b j"%

$1

&,

where Bij is the jth coefficient from the i th normalized reverse regression and bj isthe j th coefficient from the direct regression (Leamer 1992). For specification 1 intable 3, R *2

m ! .9433.16 The regressions in table 3 were rerun replacing the totalitarianism index with

the Freedom House indexes for political freedom and then for civil liberties. Notsurprisingly, given the high correlation between the political freedom and civil lib-erty indexes (the correlation coefficient was .93), all the coefficients had the samesigns as before with similar t-statistics.

17 Some may be concerned that ‘‘communist’’ nations are distinct from other ‘‘to-talitarian’’ countries and that their inclusion ‘‘biases’’ these various results in myfavor. The concern is that communist countries will obviously have high levels of

public schooling S139

I also ran separate cross-section regressions without the fixed ef-fects for the sample means for each country and for each of the eightyears, in order to examine whether the results were driven solely bytime-series changes in the data and whether these results are consis-tent across the years being studied. The results on individual countrymeans are reported in columns 5 and 6 and demonstrate a remark-able consistency with the earlier pooled estimates. While not shown,separate regressions for individual years produced results that wereconsistent across years. With the exception of the net governmenttransfers variable and the regression using just the 1992 data (whichhave the fewest number of observations), all the coefficients werestatistically significant.18

Since the expected return to indoctrination should depend onhow long the government believes it will remain in power, I reranthe regressions using a crude measure of political stability based onthe average yearly rate of coups d’etat a country experienced be-tween 1985 and 1987 (Bienen and Van de Walle 1991, pp. 109–91).19

When I used only the educational expenditure data over that sameperiod of time and controlled only for the continent dummies (be-cause of the smaller sample), the variable measuring the averagenumber of coups was quite insignificant (with t-statistics less than0.4), and the other results remained similar to those already re-ported (though the government transfers variable was no longer sta-tistically significant).

both totalitarianism and socialism and that it is equally obvious that they will ownthe media and, as the anecdotal evidence suggests, have large expenditures onschooling. This relationship may not hold for other totalitarian countries. Two re-sponses can be made to this objection. The first is that this relationship, which isassumed to be obvious for communist countries, is exactly what our model predicts.The second involves testing to see whether the observations for the communist coun-tries came from the same model as the noncommunist ones. For this test, I reesti-mated the regressions, excluding the communist countries as defined by FreedomHouse in that sample. I cannot reject the hypothesis that the observations from thesecommunist countries came from the same model as the other countries. Similarly,I performed the operation for the estimates regarding television ownership. (SeeMaddala [1977, p. 200] for the appropriate test in which there are not enoughobservations in the second set to estimate all the regression parameters.)

18 For example, the coefficients for the totalitarianism variable were 14.99 (t-statis-tic 3.456) for 1985; 26.2 (2.305) for 1986; 31.14 (2.342) for 1987; 37.3 (2.453) for1988; 34.3 (2.621) for 1989; 42.4 (1.739) for 1990; 68.0 (2.517) for 1991; and 68.28(0.982) for 1992. The results do exhibit a definite pattern where more totalitarianregimes spend more on indoctrination during the later years, and they are consistentwith the current set of results implying a larger investment in indoctrination thanwas implied by my earlier results for the 1970s (Lott 1990).

19 Posner (1996, pp. 24–25) provides correlations showing that this measure ofcoups is positively correlated with other measures of stability, but that the correlationcoefficients are never greater than .5. Ideally, one would prefer using a turnoverrate that encompassed the periods both during and after the investments beingmade in the indoctrination.

S140 journal of political economy

What about the other theories of education? If education is pub-licly valuable because it instills democratic values, then for any givenlevel of income, democratic countries should spend relatively moreon public schooling. Likewise, the hypothesis that capitalist coun-tries try to create a more docile workforce through education (e.g.,Bowles and Gintis 1976) also predicts that relatively free-marketcountries should spend more, not less. Yet according to the data, itis very clear that the vast majority of democracies with free-marketeconomies spend less. This finding is remarkably consistent acrossdifferent sets of countries and different measures of educational ex-penditures.

C. Totalitarianism and Health Care

One possible objection to the preceding results is that totalitarian-ism generally increases the size of other similar government servicesthat do not have this indoctrination component. Thus a similar posi-tive relationship between totalitarianism and such other expendi-tures would suggest that there is nothing unique about publicschooling or government ownership of television. I have chosen toalso study health care. Like schooling, health care could be a meansto invest specifically in the opportunities of children from poor fami-lies. But in contrast to schooling, there is no obvious return to indoc-trination. Any factors that alter the returns to investing in humancapital might similarly affect both education and those health careexpenditures directed toward the young. My hypothesis is that nosignificant positive relationship should exist between totalitarianismand public health expenditures. To test this, I replaced the endoge-nous variable for school expenditures with real per capita publichealth expenditures for 1990 (Murray, Govindaraj, and Musgrove[1994, pp. 635–37]; only cross-sectional data are available). The gov-ernment transfers variable was also replaced with a variable for gov-ernment spending net of public health expenditures.

The coefficients in table 4 analyzing expenditures on publichealth care show that increased totalitarianism actually decreasesthese expenditures for virtually the entire sample. But they are notdistinguishable from zero since the direct effect of totalitarianismon spending fails to be statistically significant. There is no indicationthat the effect might be large either: it is only one-twentieth the sizeof the corresponding coefficient for public schooling expenditures.

Another potential objection is that the coefficients for nonhealthgovernment expenditures may simply be serving as a proxy for the‘‘taste’’ for government involvement (see the previous discussion inSec. IIIA). However, I cannot identify such an effect: the coefficients

public schooling S141TABLE 4

Government Health Care Expenditures and Totalitarianism in 1990

Real GovernmentExpenditures on Health

Care per Capita(N ! 157)

Dependent Variable (1) (2)

Totalitarianism rating 2.8968 2.8142(.705) (.655)

GDP/population .1228 .06338(17.726) (2.782)

GDP2/population ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ 3.49e-06(2.733)

Totalitarianism rating # (GDP/population) $.0135 $.0098(6.835) (4.126)

Government expenditures/GDP net of .0349 .0987health expenditures (.045) (.129)

Intercept $21.962 19.80(.520) (.449)

Adjusted R 2 .7455 .7559F-statistic 115.26 97.63

Note.—t-statistics are in parentheses. Continent dummies are also controlled for.

are both small and insignificant. When tables 3 and 4 are compared,the results are consistent with the hypothesis that schooling pro-duces an additional return to mitigating the opposition from thesetransfers over and above what may be accounted for by ‘‘taste.’’ Ta-ble 4 also has some bearing on interpreting the government transfersvariable. One possibility is that socialist governments are spendingmore on public education because they are simply more concernedwith expanding economic opportunities for poor people. If this ex-planation were correct, similar results might be expected for healthcare. But according to my findings, this is not the case. Increased gov-ernment transfers are associated with a higher probability that thegovernment owns the television and spends more on education. Incontrast, increased government transfers are not associated with morehealth care. This supports the hypothesis that totalitarian govern-ments are motivated by a greater desire to instill certain values ratherthan by a desire to expand services to previously deprived people.

Caution is required in comparing educational and health care ex-penditures, however. For example, in contrast to educational expen-ditures, a very large portion of health care is spent on adults andthe elderly. Since a direct measure of children’s health expendituresacross countries was not available, I used information from theUnited Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund on the

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S144 journal of political economy

percentage of 1-year-old children fully immunized against tubercu-losis, DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus), polio, and measles.The share of pregnant women who were fully immunized againsttetanus yielded another suitable measure. These data were availableyearly from 1985 to 1992.

I used these two alternative measures for regression analysis, tryingvarious specifications: time-series cross-sectional pooled data withindividual country and year fixed effects, pooled data with individualcountry- and continent-specific year fixed effects, and the cross-sec-tional regressions on the sample means for each country.20 All butone of the specifications in table 5 show the opposite relationshipbetween totalitarianism and children’s health care compared towhat earlier regressions found between totalitarianism and educa-tional expenditures. Half of these regressions imply that when in-comes are below the sample mean income of $5,849, totalitariancountries will have lower immunization rates than freer countries.The average income for countries with a totalitarianism rankingabove the mean (7.98) is only $2,778. In fact, 81 percent of the obser-vations in which the totalitarianism ranking is above the mean haveincomes less than $5,849.

IV. The Fall of Communism and Its Effecton Educational Expenditures

The recent fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the formerSoviet Union provides a natural experiment. If my theory is correct,educational spending should fall as a result of the decline in totali-tarianism. The long-run returns to educational investments in hu-man capital are also likely to have changed with communism’s fall.To help control for the changing returns to investments in humancapital, we can compare the changing public expenditures in educa-tion with public expenditures for health care.21 A simple human cap-ital hypothesis might predict that total expenditures on public edu-cation would temporarily rise relative to expenditures on publichealth care simply because many individuals may want to make in-vestments that allow them to switch careers. But if the indoctrinationhypothesis is correct, educational expenditures should have de-creased relative to health care spending.

Comparing public schooling and health expenditures is also moti-

20 The estimates using continent-specific year fixed effects are not reported,but they produce less significant results.

21 Another possibility would have been to compare educational expenditures asa share of total government expenditures, but good data on this were extremelylimited during this transitional period.

public schooling S145TABLE 6

Means and Standard Deviations for Examining the Changes in EasternEurope and the Former Soviet Republics

StandardObservations Mean Deviation

Public educational expenditures as apercentage of GDP 89 4.8697 1.246

Public health care expenditures as apercentage of GDP 90 3.61 1.3472

Ratio of public educational to publichealth care expenditures 88 1.4674 .5187

Totalitarianism index 68 8.691 3.347Dummy variable for whether a country

was still communist 88 .4337 .4986

vated because real income estimates were available for relatively fewpostcommunist observations for Eastern Europe or the former So-viet republics.22 The 1995 edition of UNICEF’s The State of the World’sChildren provides consistent yearly data on school and health expen-ditures for Albania, Bulgaria, the areas that are now the Czech Re-public and Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the areas of theformer USSR that are now Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia,Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine for the period 1989–93.23

To test whether the returns to expenditures for educational indoc-trination dropped with the fall of communism, I regressed the ratioof total public educational expenditures to total public health careexpenditures alternatively on the totalitarianism ranking or on adummy variable that equals one when the country is communist.Country and year fixed effects were included. Table 6 shows thesevariables’ means and standard deviations. The results are striking.While government educational expenditures as a percentage of GDPfell by 4 percent from the last year under communism to the last

22 The data used to measure real income were taken from the Penn World Tables.Even if these estimates were available for countries making the transition from com-munism, income is likely to be measured with a great deal of noise during this period(e.g., there is the problem that while prices have risen, people will no longer haveto wait long times in queues).

23 The Estonian data were available for only one year, 1993, and thus could notbe used to determine the changes over time. For seven countries (Belarus, Bulgaria,Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Ukraine) later observations wereavailable for 1994, and for four countries (Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, and Romania)earlier observations for 1980 and 1985. While my reliance on 1989 as a starting datefor most of the sample may mean some changes are missed because of the antici-pated collapse of communism, at least for Hungary, Latvia, and Romania, their ratioof public educational and health care expenditures exhibited relatively little changefrom 1985 to 1989.

S146 journal of political economyTABLE 7

What Happened to Educational Expenditures in EasternEuropean Countries When Communism Collapsed?

Controlling for Country Fixed Effects

Ratio of a Country’sPublic Education toPublic Health Care

Expenditures in aParticular Year

N ! 62 N ! 88Dependent Variable (1) (2)

Totalitarianism rating .042 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅(3.670)

Dummy variable for whether country ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ .2667was still communist (5.081)

Intercept 1.1514 1.3305(7.606) (13.913)

Adjusted R 2 .8253 .8114F-statistic 20.21 25.96

year in the sample, government health care expenditures as a per-centage of GDP rose by over 70 percent.24

The regression results in table 7 indicate that when communismfell, public educational expenditures declined relative to publichealth care expenditures. For the first specification, a one-standard-deviation change in the totalitarianism index explains about 27 per-cent of a one-standard-deviation change in the ratio of public educa-tion to public health care expenditures. According to the secondspecification, moving from being a communist to a noncommunistcountry implies that the ratio will decline by 27 percentage points.Both specifications include country dummy variables. The resultssuggest that our measure of totalitarianism was as accurate aswhether a country was labeled ‘‘communist’’ in determining govern-ment expenditures.

V. Totalitarianism and Replacing the Familyas the Source of Values

As suggested earlier for Sweden, governments might attempt toweaken parental influence by encouraging women to enter the work-force, thus encouraging parents to be away from their children.

24 Discussions with UNICEF indicate that this represents a real increase in healthexpenditures and not a mistake in their failing to account for switches in accountingpractices. The agency spent a great deal of time putting these numbers togetherfor these two categories, and comparisons with other government expenditures dur-ing this period of time are very limited.

public schooling S147

While these policies may take many forms (e.g., taxes or opportuni-ties for government employment), I shall use the indirect approachof measuring whether female labor force participation rates vary bytype of government. Other suggestive evidence that would be consis-tent with governments’ raising the cost of parental involvement isthe extent of illegitimate births or divorces. Given the scarcity oftime, parental influence is more difficult when there is only a singleparent heading a household, and single parents are more likely torely on outside substitutes such as the government. Families obvi-ously also break up in nontotalitarian countries, and this will alsoaffect family-transmitted values. But the question here is whetherthe rate of family breakup is higher in more totalitarian countries.

Obviously other factors, independent of the influences of govern-ment—such as income, culture, and religion—affect female laborforce participation, illegitimate births, and divorces. Increased laborforce participation and higher education are associated with fewerchildren (Laumann et al. 1994, p. 458). It is hoped that employingthe specifications used earlier in this paper, including fixed effectsand income, accounts for at least some of these factors. Any relation-ships are also fraught with questions of reverse causation.25 The linkbetween government transfers and family breakdown is extremely

25 An alternative hypothesis is that more totalitarian and socialist countries investin public nursery schools and promote female labor force participation rates as ameans of promoting sexual equality. Thus the breakdown of the family is not thedesired end result, but a by-product that is generated when governments attemptto promote equality. Yet, with respect to the case of divorce, women are makinglarger family-specific investments, and thus making divorces easier facilitates en-abling already-married men to hold up married women for the investments thatthey have made in the family (e.g., Parkman 1992).

Communists have long viewed themselves as advocating changes that liberatewomen. Marx viewed it as one of the benefits of the withering away of the family(McLellan 1973). Yet in the Soviet Union, these changes have not produced the‘‘panacea’’ claimed in Marxist ideology. Smith (1976, p. 127) writes that many Rus-sian women feel that these ‘‘advances’’ have ‘‘made life more trying.’’ In addition,it is very easy to find explicit references to using many of these very same policiesto separate children from their families so that the correct views can be instilled inchildren (Glenn 1995).

The most direct measure of these predictions would have been the total costsimposed by governments on families that remain together, though this is not avail-able. Another problem with divorce rates and other measures is that governmentsare changing not merely the costs but also the returns to families remaining intact.In more totalitarian countries, families may have a greater incentive to remain to-gether because it is more difficult for them to trust others. It is possible that totalitar-ian governments are successful even if the regressions find that families are morestable under totalitarian governments, simply because these governments may haveprevented families from being as stable as they would otherwise have been. My mea-sure of totalitarianism is thus likely to underestimate the returns to totalitarian gov-ernments’ weakening families and thus makes it difficult to find a positive relation-ship between totalitarianism and these variables.

S148 journal of political economy

unreliable because more family breakdowns can induce more trans-fers; thus no emphasis will be placed on it here. It is also conceivablethat countries with unstable family relationships may facilitate totali-tarian regimes’ coming to power in the first place. Some evidencefrom East and West Germany suggests that totalitarianism has anindependent effect. Both regions had fairly similar divorce rates un-til the imposition of communism after World War II split Germanyapart; it was only after the imposition of communism that the ratein East Germany gradually became higher (Haskey 1992).

Finally, more totalitarian governments may start public pre–pri-mary schooling at an earlier age and have a larger percentage ofpre–primary school age children attending government-runschools.26 To test the relationship between totalitarianism and thesetwo measures of separating children from the influence of their par-ents, the type of specification used in table 3 explaining educationalexpenditures is again used here, along with government expendi-tures net of educational expenditures.

While the results reported in table 8 are not as consistently sig-nificant as earlier ones, the general pattern remains similar to thoseshown in tables 2 and 3. In all the specifications, higher totalitarian-ism is related to changes that are consistent with raising the cost ofdirect parental involvement in forming children’s views. Column 1examines the relationship between the type of government and fe-male labor force participation. The cross-country female labor forceparticipation rates for 1989, 1990, and 1991 were produced by divid-ing the ratio of females to males in the labor force by the ratio offemales to males in the general population and expressing this as apercentage (1993 and 1994 editions of the United Nations’ HumanDevelopment Report).27 Illegitimacy, in column 2, is measured by thenumber of illegitimate births per 100 live births in 1985 (UnitedNations 1988). Two measures of divorce are also available over multi-ple years, though both are somewhat problematic.28 One measure,

26 For this last test, it is not really necessary to distinguish whether children wentto private schools or remained home with their parents, but simply whether thechildren were being educated at this young age by the government.

27 Using only the variable for females as a percentage of males in the labor forceproduced even more statistically and economically significant results than those re-ported in table 5. The value for females as a percentage of males in the labor forcefor 1989 was obtained from the average for 1988–90, and the value for 1991 wasobtained from the average for 1990–92. I also tried running the averages for femalesas a percentage of males in the labor force on the averages for those years for themeasures of totalitarianism, socialism, and per capita income, with similar results.

28 For our purposes, what matters is whether people are married while they areraising their children, so the assumption is that these measures of divorce are posi-tively correlated with divorces among couples with minor children. Both measuresof divorce also fail to account (though in different ways) for the age distributionof the population.

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S150 journal of political economy

which uses divorces as a percentage of marriages during a particularyear, fails to deal with the stock of preexisting marriages. A secondmeasure uses divorces per 1,000 population.

Totalitarianism’s impact on family structure in table 8 is similarto the effects shown for schooling and government ownership oftelevision, though the coefficient is not statistically significant forfemale labor force participation rates. For two-thirds of the sample,increased totalitarianism increases female labor force participation,and the effect can be large. At the median income, a one-standard-deviation change in totalitarianism can explain 24 percent of a one-standard-deviation change in female labor force participation. Theregression results indicate that increases in totalitarianism increaseillegitimacy for 77 percent of the sample and raise divorce rates forat least 73 percent of the sample (when either measure of divorceis used). Again, the effects are quite large. At the median income,a one-standard-deviation change in totalitarianism can explain 61percent of a one-standard-deviation change in illegitimate births.

The results for starting age for school and the percentage of pre-school children attending public schools provide only mixed sup-port for the hypothesis.29 While the coefficients’ signs are consistentwith the indoctrination hypothesis, only the results for preschoolattendance of public schools are statistically significant.

VI. Totalitarianism and the Rents EducatorsReceive

A corollary of the view that totalitarian governments value publicschooling to instill desired values is that they will also pay rents toteachers. When it is difficult to monitor teacher behavior, the threat-ened loss of these premiums can help ensure that teachers work toinstill the desired views. The issue is to identify which teachers mustbe paid the highest rents in order to elicit their cooperation.

South Africa during 1981 provides an interesting test. There werefour different school systems coexisting side by side in apartheid-eraSouth Africa divided along racial lines: whites, Asians, coloreds, andblacks.30 Teachers were segregated along the same racial lines as the

29 The data on starting ages for school and the percentage of preschool childrenattending public schools are obtained from the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook (1991,1993, and 1994). The results are available from the author.

30 See South African Bureau of Statistics (1974, pp. 7.23–7.55). The wage data andthe data on the percentage of each racial group in each occupation are taken fromGordon et al. (1978). The data on the percentage of whites with a standard 10level of education for all professions other than education were obtained from JoshGersen, Department of Economics, University of Cape Town, South Africa. The in-dustry classifications available were primary and secondary school education, basicmetals, metal products, machinery, electrical, clothing, textiles, chemicals, food, bev-erages, tobacco, leather, footwear, wood and cork, furniture, paper and paper prod-ucts, rubber, plastic products, nonmetallic minerals, mining, construction, wholesale

public schooling S151

students. My hypothesis would predict that nonwhite educators re-ceive rents relative to those of white educators. It was less costly fora white teacher to support the racist government, in terms of theamount of opposition he or she faced. Also, white educators werereceiving the general benefits from having a white government. Incontrast, the traditional explanation, which treats teachers as an in-terest group whose support is being purchased at the ballot box,would predict that it is the white—not black—educators who re-ceived the greatest transfers. After all, it is whites and not blacks whocould vote.

To test this, I compiled the natural log of the average white, Asian,colored, and black monthly wages (ln wage) across 35 different in-dustries (Dj, where j ! industry), including elementary and second-ary schools as one industry. I also have a dummy variable for race(Asian, African, and colored) and an interactive term for whethersomeone both is an educator and belongs to a particular race. Nor-mally, a wage regression would also include information on educa-tion levels for each of the four racial groups in each industry. Unfor-tunately, such data are available only for whites and measure onlythe percentage of whites in each industry who have obtained at leasta standard 10 level of education (approximately twelfth grade inAmerican high schools). I use this variable to rank the amount ofeducation by industry, and if this specification is to be accurate, onemust assume that the amount of education required for the differentraces is strongly correlated across industries. However, I have no in-formation to indicate whether this is true. Finally, the percentageof workers in an occupation held by each racial group provides arough measure to control for industries that restrict entry:

ln wage i

! C " '34

J!1

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" b39 African # educator i " b40 colored # educator i (3)

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" '4

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" ui .

trade, retail trade, motor trade, hotels, banking, building societies, manufacturing,motor vehicle production, post office, South African Transport System, central gov-ernment, provincial government, local government, and insurance companies.

S152 journal of political economyTABLE 9

Means and Standard Deviations for Examining the Monthy Wages inSouth Africa in 1980

StandardObservations Mean Deviation

ln(wage) 139 6.1317 .61318Percentage of whites with standard

10 education by industry 139 .8112 .1081Percentage of occupation occupied

by Africans 139 .4712 .1937Percentage of occupation occupied

by Asians 139 .0603 .0623Percentage of occupation occupied

by coloreds 139 .1634 .1021Percentage of occupation occupied

by whites 139 .3068 .1973

The dummy variable for whites and the dummy variable for bankingare excluded so that the intercept term represents white earningsin banking. I expect the following results: the race dummies shouldbe negative, the interactions between the race and educator dum-mies should be positive, and the percentage of whites with a standard10 education by industry should be positive. The means and stan-dard deviations of the variables are shown in table 9.

The results from running equation (3) are shown in table 10. Allthe coefficients have the predicted sign. They indicate that evenafter the normal return to being an educator is controlled for, beinga nonwhite and an educator increases earnings even more. Further-more, each one of the race variables is significant, and the interactiveterms for Africans, Asians, and coloreds are significant at least at the0.10 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. While white educators havehigher absolute earnings, the minority educators received the great-est rents. Accounting for the percentage of an occupation occupiedby each race raised the t-statistics for the race and education industrydummies but did not qualitatively alter the results. To allow moredifferences in educational attainment across racial groups, the lasttwo specifications also show the effect of interacting the percentageof whites with a standard 10 education by industry by each of theracial dummies. Again, the results were very similar.

These results could arise because of greater similarity in skillacross race in education than in other industries.31 Greater homoge-

31 The qualifications for nonwhite educators are significantly lower than for whites.The percentages of teachers by race that do not have a teacher’s certificate or di-ploma and a standard 10 level of education are 3.36 percent for whites, 85 percentfor Africans, 19.7 percent for Asians, and 66.14 percent for coloreds (Gordon et al.1978). Unfortunately, this type of breakdown was not available across occupational

public schooling S153TABLE 10

Rents to Educators in South Africa (N ! 139)

Specification

(1) (2) (3) (4)

Intercept 5.269 5.4811 5.0380 5.2156(22.052) (28.121) (12.777) (16.479)

Education industry dummy .0684 .0963 .03813 .0042(.331) (.561) (.207) (.029)

African $1.4074 $1.678 $1.1619 $1.5709(30.973) (16.297) (3.371) (5.577)

Asian $.7676 $.8934 $.4155 $.3361(16.725) (12.627) (1.185) (1.084)

Colored $1.1295 $1.288 $1.1619 $1.2871(24.857) (15.429) (3.371) (4.206)

African educator* .5025 .4927 .5302 .5033(1.869) (2.296) (1.936) (2.339)

Asian educator* .6882 .6576 .7296 .7180(2.559) (3.063) (2.661) (3.335)

Colored educator* .4602 .4493 .4659 .4488(1.712) (2.094) (1.701) (.2087)

Percentage of whites with standard 1.873 1.90 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅10 level of education (6.070) (7.726)

Percentage of whites with standard10 education by industry inter-acted with dummy variables for:Whites ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ 2.205 2.29

(3.688) (4.866)Coloreds ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ .0214 .0230

(3.385) (4.588)Asians ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ .0177 .0164

(2.775) (3.220)Blacks ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ .0190 .0218

(3.005) (4.350)Adjusted R 2 .9066 .9405 .9051 .9415F-statistic 34.51 50.59 31.59 48.30

Note.—The endogenous variable is the log of monthly wage. Specifications 2 and 4 also control for thepercentage of occupation occupied by each racial group.

neity in education would presumably have the greatest impact onAfricans who earn the lowest wages in other occupations. While Icannot completely rule this out, the ranking of the interactive coef-ficients for race and whether one is an educator provides some evi-dence against this objection. The coefficients for Asian educatorsare consistently larger than for African educators.

groups. Another objection is that the supply of nonwhite educators (those withenough education) is small relative to the number demanded compared to whites.While this may be true over the short run, in the long run it seems that the reversewould be true since nonwhites are relatively restricted in terms of opportunities. Inother words, we expect that the long-run supply of nonwhite educators is moreelastic that the long-run supply of white educators.

S154 journal of political economy

VII. Conclusion

A consistent relationship exists between the form of government andthe level of investments made in public education. Totalitarian gov-ernments and governments with high transfers spend a lot on publiceducation and are likely to own television stations. This cannot beexplained simply by greater involvement in all sectors, as data onhealth care show. The finding is borne out from cross-sectional time-series evidence across countries. A similar relationship was alsofound for public educational expenditures during Eastern Europe’sand the former Soviet Union’s recent transition from communism.

In addition, this paper examined a broad array of phenomenathat are consistent with more totalitarian and socialist governments’raising the costs of parental involvement in shaping their children’svalues. Examples include raising the female labor participation rate,raising the illegitimate birth rate and divorce rate, and lowering theschool age for the public school system. The results correspondclosely with those found for government ownership of television andpublic educational expenditures.

However, just as governments benefit from controlling the infor-mation people receive through education and television, my resultssuggest that politicians generally should also be expected to careabout the information that voters receive. Information is costly, andpolitical ‘‘spin’’ may matter.32

Appendix

Data Sources

The totalitarianism ranking from 1985 to 1993 was obtained from Freedomat Issue, the January–February issues for 1986–90, and from Freedom Review,the January–February issues for 1991–94. The source for the type of owner-ship of television stations was the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook (1989). Pri-mary and secondary public educational expenditures as a percentage ofgross national product and as a percentage of government expenditureswere available from the 1989–93 editions of the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook,table 4.5; this was used to calculate government expenditures net of educa-tional expenditures as a percentage of GNP. Observations that includedmore than primary and secondary schooling, did not include both, or listedonly expenditures by the central government were excluded. The age atwhich children are required to start school is obtained from the 1993 and

32 For a discussion of how changing the relative costs of information in a democ-racy can matter, see Lott and Fremling (1989). For an example of other decision-making costs in political markets, see Coate and Morris (1995) and Fremling andLott (1996).

public schooling S1551994 editions of the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook, table 3.2. The percentageof preschool children attending public schools is also taken from that samesource from the 1991, 1993, and 1994 editions, table 3.3. Data on currentand total educational expenditures were also obtained from table 4.5. Thedata on population, a real price index based on terms of trade to converteducational expenditures into real 1985 dollars, and real GDP per capitain constant 1985 dollars using a chain index were obtained from the PennWorld Tables. The national public health expenditure data for 1990 wereobtained from Murray et al. (1994). The data for the ratio of public educa-tional to public health care expenditures are obtained from UNICEF’s (Au-gust 1994) table on government revenue and expenditure. The averagecoups d’etat rate during 1985–87 was available from Bienen and Van deWalle (1991, pp. 109–91).

Immunization rates for tuberculosis, DPT, polio, measles, and tetanuswere obtained from UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children (variousyears). Data on the percentage of illegitimate births were obtained fromthe Demographic Yearbook, 1986 (United Nations 1988). The divorce rate per1,000 population is taken from various issues of the Demographic Yearbook.The marriage rate per 1,000 population was obtained from the same source,and the measure of divorces as a percentage of marriages is simply thedivorce rate divided by the marriage rate. Female labor force participationrates (females as a percentage of males) and the ratio of females to malesin the population were both drawn from the United Nation’s Human Devel-opment Report for 1992, 1993, and 1994.

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