The original article “The Non-Democratic Roots of Mass Education: Evidence from 200 Years” concludes that, on average, (i) “central governments began to regulate primary education about a century before a country’s first transition to democracy” (180, see Figure 3); (ii) “over two-thirds of school-age children were already enrolled in primary school a decade before democratization” (180, see Figure 4, Panel A); (iii) “democratization had no or little impact on primary school enrollment rates” (179, see Figures 5 and 6); and (iv) “democratization can lead to an expansion of primary schooling, but the key condition under which it does—when a majority lacked access to primary schooling before democratization—rarely holds” (179, see Panel B of Figure 4, Figure 7, and Table 1). This corrigendum corrects coding errors that affected Figures 3-7 and Table 1 of the original article. These errors led to (a) Barbados, Belize, Iceland, and Malta being classified as non-democracies according to Polity, when in fact they should be coded as missing; (b) many countries being incorrectly coded as not having universal male suffrage (UMS) from 2001-2010 according to the PIPE dataset, when in fact they should be coded as having UMS; (c) countries that never democratized being accidentally dropped when producing Panel B of Figure 6; and (d) data from 1830-2010 being used to produce Figures 6-7 and Table 1, when in fact data from 1820-2010 should be used as indicated by the title of these illustrations. The author regrets these errors. The revised code and dataset and the revised Supplementary Materials are available on the Dataverse. The revised code also includes information about the assumptions that were made when merging Lee and Lee’s (Reference Lee and Lee2016) school enrollment dataset with the three datasets used to measure the timing of democratization. As shown in corrected Figures and Table below, the difference between the original results and the corrected ones is barely perceptible. The conclusions of the original article remain unaltered.
Timing of Democratization and State Intervention in Primary Education, by Country (Revised Results)
Sources: Author for timing of primary education interventions in Panel A (see Online Appendix C); Lee and Lee (Reference Lee and Lee2016) for timing of primary school enrollment statistics in Panel B; Polity Project for timing of democracy.
Primary School Enrollment Rates in Countries that Experienced Democratization, 1820–2010 (Revised Results)
Note: For visualization purposes, in Panel A quinquennial data on enrollment rates were linearly interpolated to obtain annual estimates. Trends based on the original (quinquennial) data are shown in the revised Figure A5.
Sources: Lee and Lee (Reference Lee and Lee2016) for enrollment rates; Polity Project for timing of democracy.
Average Primary School Enrollment Rates before and after Democratization, Treated and Comparison Countries, 1820–2010 and Subperiods (Revised Results)
Note: Democratizing countries’ trend in black; non-democracies’ in gray. For visualization purposes, quinquennial enrollment rates at the country level were interpolated to obtain annual estimates. For each country that democratized in year t = T, I compute the average primary school enrollment rate of a comparison group, which in any given year t is composed of countries that were non-democratic in that year. I then compute the average primary school enrollment rate across all comparison groups, depicted by the gray line.
Sources: Lee and Lee (Reference Lee and Lee2016) for enrollment rates; Polity Project for timing of democracy.
Estimated Effect of Democratization on Primary School Enrollment Rates, 1820–2010 and Subperiods (Revised Results)
Note: Point estimates and 95% confidence intervals from standard errors clustered at the country level. In Panel B, point estimates reflect the effect of democracy within 10 years of democratization. A total of 105 countries contribute data to estimate the equations that span the entire period (1820–2010) and the post-war period (1945–2010); 93 countries contribute data to estimate the equations that focus on the pre-war period (1820-1944).
Sources: Lee and Lee (Reference Lee and Lee2016) for enrollment rates; Polity Project, BMR, and Przeworski et al. (Reference Przeworski2013) for timing of democracy.
Average Primary School Enrollment Rates before and after Democratization, Treated Countries by Whether or Not a Majority of Children Were Already Enrolled in Primary Schooling before Democratization, and Comparison Countries, 1820–2010 (Revised Results)
Note: Average primary school enrollment rate in democratizing countries where a majority of children were enrolled in primary education before democratization (black line), in democratizing countries where a majority of children were not enrolled in primary education before democratization (blue), and in control countries (light gray).
Sources: Lee and Lee (Reference Lee and Lee2016) for enrollment rates, Polity Project, BMR, and Przeworski et al. (Reference Przeworski2013) for timing of democracy.
Heterogeneous Effect of Democratization Depending on Whether a Majority of Children Already Had Access to Primary Education before Democratization, 1820–2010 (Revised Results)
Note: Results based on a linear difference-in-differences model with country and year fixed effects similar to the one given by Equation 1 but allowing for heterogeneous treatment effects depending on the level of primary school enrollment rates prior to democratization. Ordinary least squares estimates (Panel A) and Tobit estimates (Panel B). Standard errors clustered at the country level are in parentheses. Stars denote statistical significance at the *0.05 and **0.01 level. The number of countries contributing data is 109.
Sources: Lee and Lee (Reference Lee and Lee2016) for enrollment rates; Polity Project, BMR, and Przeworski et al. (Reference Przeworski2013) for timing of democracy.
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