Demography, Education, and Democracy: global trends and the case of Iran.
Reconstructions and projections of populations by age, sex, and educational attainment for 120 countries since 1970 are used to assess the global relationship between improvements in human capital and democracy. Democracy is measured by the Freedom House indicator of political rights. Similar to an earlier study on the effects of improving educational attainment on economic growth, the greater age detail of this new dataset resolves earlier ambiguities about the effect of improving education as assessed using a global set of national time series. The results show consistently strong effects of improving overall levels of educational attainment, of a narrowing gender gap in education, and of fertility declines and the subsequent changes in age structure on improvements in the democracy indicator. This global relationship is then applied to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Over the past two decades Iran has experienced the world's most rapid fertility decline associated with massive increases in female education. The results show that based on the experience of 120 countries since 1970, Iran has a high chance of significant movement toward more democracy over the following two decades.
Lutz
Wolfgang
W
Leader of the World Population Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria; Director of the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences; Professor of Social and Economic Statistics at the WU-Vienna University of Economics and Business; and Professorial Research Fellow at Oxford University.
Cuaresma
Jesús Crespo
JC
Abbasi-Shavazi
Mohammad Jalal
MJ
D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D003709:Democracy; D003710:Demography; D003906:Developing Countries / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history; D004467:Economics / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D004493:Education / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D005298:Fertility; D005783:Gender Identity; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006806:Human Rights / Q000191:economics / Q000193:education / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000523:psychology; D007492:Iran / Q000208:ethnology; D011056:Political Systems / Q000266:history; D011157:Population Dynamics; D012923:Social Class / Q000266:history