Do Democracy Selected Educated Leader

American Political Science Review

Vol. 105, No. 3

August 2011

doi:10.1017/S0003055411000281

Do Democracies Select More Educated Leaders?

TIMOTHY BESLEY London School of Economics and Political Science MARTA REYNAL-QUEROL Universitat Pompeu Fabra

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his paper uses a unique data set on over 1,400 world leaders between 1848 and 2004 to investigate differences in educational qualifications between leaders who are selected in democracies and autocracies. After including country and year fixed effects, we find that democracies are around 20% more likely to select highly educated leaders. This finding is robust to a wide range of specifications, choices of subsamples, controls, and ways of measuring education and democracy. who are chosen.2 Education is a particularly interesting aspect of political selection in view of the strong correlation found between educational attainment and earnings, which is consistent with education either enhancing skills or signaling ability. Education is also strongly correlated with civic engagement. Education is thus a compelling indicator of a leader’s quality. This paper also adds to the large cross-country empirical literature comparing democracies and autocracies. The focus of that literature has mainly been on whether being a democracy enhances a country’s economic performance, particularly growth. Early contributions to the cross-country literature include Przeworski and Limongi (1993) and Barro (1996), who conclude that the correlation between democracy and growth is weak and not robust. However, a recent panel data analysis by Papaioannou and Siourounis (2008) based on within-country estimates of permanent transitions, i.e., those where democracy is consolidated, finds that, on average, democratization is associated with a 0.5 to 1 percentage point increase in the annual growth rate. This finding is broadly consistent with Persson and Tabellini (2009)’s novel econometric approach, which also finds support for the...