Formal Education and Contentious Politics: The Case of Violent and Non-Violent Protest
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929921998210 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929921998210
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(3) 366 –389
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929921998210
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Formal Education and
Contentious Politics:
The Case of Violent and
Non-Violent Protest
Patrick S Sawyer1
and Andrey V Korotayev1, 2
Abstract
This study investigates the effect that formal education, as a factor of socio-economic development,
has on the intensity and forms of political protest. By way of increased socialization of democratic
values, increased cognitive understanding of the society at large, and human capital to participate
in protests, increases in a country’s level of formal education should theoretically lead to increased
levels of peaceful protest. However, increases in formal education are also theorized to play a
mitigating role on the intensity of violent protests (riots) for the previously mentioned reasons as
well as the fact that education acts as a strong factor in increasing social mobility. With data from
1960 to 2010 and spanning 216 countries, our empirical tests demonstrate a significant positive
relationship between formal education and the intensity of anti-government protests at the early
stages of socio-political development and a strong negative relationship between education and
riots along the full range of data, with the later stages of development revealing a particularly
strong negative correlation.
Keywords
education, protests, anti-government demonstrations, riots
Accepted: 8 February 2021
Introduction
The twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented rise in mass education around the
world. In many developing countries, illiteracy was on the path to being “liquidated”
while in the most developed countries, university enrollment was booming (Hobsbawm,
1994: 295–297). Whereas university students counted only in the hundreds of thousands
prior to the Second World War, by the 1980s, they numbered in the millions in the most
1Laboratory for Sociopolitical Destabilization Risks Monitoring, HSE University, Moscow, Russia
2Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia.
Corresponding author:
Andrey V Korotayev, Laboratory for Sociopolitical Destabilization Risks Monitoring, HSE University, 20
Myasnitskaya, Moscow 101000, Russia.
Email: akorotayev@gmail.com
998210PSW0010.1177/1478929921998210Political Studies ReviewSawyer and Korotayev
research-article2021
Article
Sawyer and Korotayev 367
economically developed countries, making up anywhere from 1.5% to 3% of the total
population. This was to be expected, as the economic growth in these countries required
a more educated population to take over the positions in the ever-growing service sector.
An unexpected consequence of this was the massive protest movements that took off in
the late 1960s around the world, mainly led by students. The French student revolt of May
1968, which linked the students’ radical demands to those of the traditional labor move-
ment, brought the French economy to a total standstill with its general strikes, university
occupations, and street battles (Tilly and Wood, 2009: 69; Touraine, 2018). These events
would go on to inspire similar student movements in the United States, Mexico, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Canada, and Pakistan (Hobsbawm, 1994: 298; Tilly and
Wood, 2009: 69). In the United States, aside from forming a significant part of the “New
Left,” students also played a pivotal role in both the anti-war movement (Zinn, 2005:
490–491) and the Freedom Summer campaign in the Civil Rights movement (Snow and
Soule, 2010: 121). In the era of mass education, students and intellectuals had seemed to
be replacing the proletariat as the agents of reformatory and radical protest.
Anecdotal cases aside, recent studies point to education being a rather robust, statisti-
cally significant predictor of political protest intensity (Kostelka and Rovny, 2019;
Machado et al., 2009; McVeigh and Smith, 1999; Moseley, 2015; Volkov, 2012). Students
have been shown to be much more likely to attend demonstrations (Enikolopov et al.,
2020; Greene, 1990; Grinin et al., 2017) and locations where universities are present have
also shown not only to be more prone to experiencing political protests but also inducing
such protests (Dahlum and Wig, 2021). The same relationship can be generally found on
the national level as well; in those countries with higher levels of education, there is an
increased tendency for non-violent political protests to occur (Hall et al., 1986; Jenkins
and Wallace, 1996; Korotayev et al., 2018a; Olson, 1963).
With this in mind, this study intends to investigate the relationship between the prolif-
eration of formal education that occurs during the modernization process and the intensity
of protest felt by a country. What effect, if any, does formal education have on the inten-
sity of political protest? We argue that by increasing the level of formal education in a
given country, this should bring about an increased intensity in anti-government demon-
strations. Moreover, the qualitative form of such protests is also of interest to us; we argue
that with increases in formal education, we should expect to see both a rise in non-violent
protests (anti-government demonstrations) and a fall in violent protest (riots). On one
hand, education increases the individual’s ability to “receive and interpret messages
related to a remote political community” (Inglehart, 1970), which increases their distrust
of institutionalized politics, engages them with new ideas that can give rise to new griev-
ances (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005; Welzel, 2013), and gives them the necessary knowl-
edge to be effective at protests (Morris and Staggenborg, 2007: 174–176), which promotes
the likelihood they will peacefully protest. On the other hand, formal educational curricu-
lum tend to downplay the value of conflict in favor of dialogue and compromise (Østby
et al., 2019), instill democratic values in students (Boli et al., 1985: 147–149; Inglehart,
1970), and encourage them to participate through more institutional means (Alesina and
Perotti, 1996; Hegre, 2003; Hibbs, 1973; Huntington, 1968), all of which lower the indi-
vidual’s tendency to protest in a violent manner.
Our contributions to the literature are fourfold: (1) we test the relationship between the
level of formal education in a given country and the intensity of political protest from
1960 to 2010, using a cross-national dataset (CNTS), demonstrating a clear relationship
between the two throughout the entirety of the dataset; (2) we develop a theory related to
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