09:30 - 11:10
P6
Room:
Room: South Hall 2A
Panel Session 6
Adrian del Rio, Masaaki Higashijima - Party Origins, Elite Defections, and Autocratic Breakdown
Roman-Gabriel Olar - Autocratic Revolving Doors: When do autocratic elites make a democratic comeback?
Magnus Bergli Rasmussen - Educated to Democratize? Education and Elite support for Universal suffrage
Manuel Vogt - Elite Networks and Political Survival
Educated to Democratize? Education and Elite support for Universal suffrage
P6-3
Presented by: Magnus Bergli Rasmussen
Magnus Bergli Rasmussen
University of Oslo
We develop and test implications of the argument that education promotes democratization, by focusing on elites’ university education, and how that influences their role in supporting and actively promoting the introduction of universal suffrage. We examine this with evidence from the suffrage extensions in Norway during the late 19th and early 20th century, drawing on novel data on Norwegian MP’s educational background and revealed preferences for universal suffrage. We argue that higher education, especially when it is secular and exposes students to enlightenment ideas and critical thinking, is likely to foster commitments to equality and universal rights. This in turn nurtures support for equality of voting rights for all classes and genders. We should therefore expect MPs with higher education to be supporters of democratization and the equality of rights, and especially so for those with secular university-education (as opposed to, e.g. education from professional schools).We test our expectations drawing on data from 68 constitutional proposals for universal suffrage and 29 Roll-Call Votes for the same in Norway, from 1883 to the adoption gender neutral universal suffrage in 1913. Our results indicate that university education among MPs is associated with proposing or voting for universal suffrage reforms. These results are robust to accounting for rollcall fixed effects, profession, socialization environment, fathers’ class, party-identification. This is consistent with the argument that educated MPs revealed preferences for universal suffrage are driven by ideological preferences rather than material incentives.