Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between school provision and the political power of the president in Uruguay between 1914 and 1954. The empirical analysis relies on fixed effects panel estimations based on newly compiled information about the partisan orientation of legislative members, electoral competition and schooling diffusion at the department-level. Ceteris paribus, I find an association between school provision and the need of government to capture votes or to obtain further legislative support. The resource allocation initially benefitted government’s core voter departments and shifted to favor non-loyal districts as an answer to the increasing intra-party political conflicts. Against the traditional historical narrative, the results point out to an influence of political interests on the diffusion of mass schooling and suggest the use of school provision as a pork barrel good over the period.
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Notes
Golden and Min (2013) review more than 150 studies of distributive politics.
A related—but different—literature regarding the effect of the ideology of the governing parties on public education expenditure has been subject to a lively debate in political science (Garriztmann and Seng 2016).
President Latorre established a dictatorial regime from 1876 to 1879.
The public schooling system achieved its complete secularization in 1909.
These new regulations came into force in 1923. The Constitution also stated that women’s citizenship rights could be granted by law. This occurred in 1932.
This reform has been traditionally known as the “half-half Senate” or “senado de medio y medio”.
The “Colorados” are liberal, anticlerical and identified with urban areas. The Nationalists (also known as “Whites”) are more conservative and aligned to rural interests. Beyond these general features, differences in ideological background or social composition have been negligible (González 1990).
The integral PR was in force until 1997 following the D’Hondt formula adjusted by the Uruguayan politician M. Halty. It implied that votes were firstly distributed among parties at the country level for both chambers. In the case of deputies (low chamber MPs), another electoral operation distributed the seats among party-factions and their lists across the 19 departments. Moreover, a final mathematical correction stated that those departments where no party/faction achieved the exact quota for a seat allocation should contribute to award a seat in others. This would maintain the most proportional system of representation as possible (Altman et al. 2011).
The president’s legislative power includes her prerogative to set partial vetoes and decrees, to take budgetary decisions, to initiate the legislation and to censure or dissolve the legislature (Shugart and Carey 1992).
To understand the political visibility of party-factions note that the 1933 coup d’Estat was led by a faction within the Colorado party supported by a faction of the Nationalist party (the Herreristas). Also the batllists (belonging to the governing party) and the Independent Nationalists (dissidents from the Nationalist party) abstained from voting in 1938.
Montevideo gathered more than half of the electorate and the Colorados were dominant throughout the period (their vote margins were over 30 pp). The number of Nationalist deputies in Montevideo ranged, roughly, between 25 and 33%.
The total number of deputies was 90 until 1916, 123 for the period 1917 to 1932 and 99 from then onward. There were some exceptions in the number of elected deputies at the department level, namely Flores in 1914, 1929 and 1932 and Rio Negro in 1926 and 1929 which had one deputy.
The ENF is computed as \(\frac{1}{\sum _{i=1}^{n}{\left({x}_{i}/\bar{x}\right)}^{2}}\), being \(\bar{x}\): total no. of seats; \({x}_{i}\): seats of the ith political faction.
The data availability does not allow to count on the vote shares by party factions at the department level.
Between 1918 and 1932 only men aged 18 and more were eligible to vote. Women were included from then onward. Due to data availability, the electorate is computed as the number of men (and men and women since 1938) older than 20 years old.
Following column 2, \({\beta }_{ppp}=\) 0.688 and \({\beta }_{ppp}\times year trend=\)− 0.41, which implies that the net effect of PPP on school provision becomes negative after year 17 ( \(\frac{0.688}{0.41}=17).\) For the time series here, considered year 17 is 1930.
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Acknowledgments
I am particularly grateful to Alfonso Herranz Loncan for his valued comments and advice and to Gabriele Cappelli, Sergio Espuelas Barroso and Matías Brum for their suggestions. Thanks to the participants of the Uruguayan Association for Economic History conference (2018), the European Historical Economics Society conference (2019) and those of the seminar of the Department of Economic History at Universitat de Barcelona (2019). I am also very thankful to the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for insightful comments that significantly improved the paper. All errors are my own responsibility.
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A former version of this document was written with the financial support of the Grant Program “Personal Investigador en Formació” (12a. Convocatòria), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
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Azar, P. Politics as a determinant of primary school provision: the case of Uruguay. Cliometrica 16, 333–367 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-021-00228-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-021-00228-3