Education Policy and Nation-Building: Evidence from a Mass Schooling Program in Nepal

The authors, Apoorva Lal, Rashesh Shrestha, Vinish Shrestha, and Avidit Acharya, study the political consequences of a mass-schooling program implemented during Nepal's first period of democratization in the 1950s. They find that cohorts targeted by the program had higher levels of primary and secondary education and were more likely to adopt Nepali as their first or second language. An important long run political effect of the program was to increase participation in elections after the restoration of democracy in 1990; however, these effects are not present for the most marginalized caste and ethnic groups. Overall, their findings suggest a persistent nationalizing effect of mass education among certain caste and ethnic groups that were previously excluded, but not among the most marginalized.

Speaker:

Avidit Acharya is a political scientist whose research is primarily in the fields of political economy, political history, and game theory as it applies to the study of politics. A major stream of Avi’s research is concerned with how societies evolve over time, and how historical forces and events can cast a long shadow on the present. His first book titled Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton University Press, 2018) shows that contemporary differences in political attitudes across the American South trace their origins to slavery’s prevalence more than 150 years ago. His second book titled The Cartel System of States: An Economic Theory of International Politics is forthcoming with Oxford University Press and traces the development of the territorial state system from its creation in Early Modern Europe to its spread across the world in the last five centuries via conquest, colonialism, and international institutions. He has also written on distributive politics in India, the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, and the consequences of statelessness in Somalia, among many other topics.

Moderated by Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Assistant Professor in Political Science at Stanford University

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