Sociology

Democratization

Sample (material)

Government (linguistics)

Population

Dictatorship

Economic growth

Politics

Demography

Philosophy

Political economy

Political science

Economics

Chemistry

Incentive

Linguistics

Development economics

Democracy

Public administration

Nation-building

Market economy

Chromatography

The Economic Journal

Democracies and dictatorships have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenise the population, i.e., ‘to build a nation’. We study and compare nation-building policies under the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a model where the type of government and borders of the country are endogenous. We find that the threat of democratisation provides the strongest incentive to homogenise. We focus upon a specific nation-building policy: mass primary education. We offer historical discussions of nation-building across time and space, and provide correlations for a large sample of countries over the 1925–2014 period.

Nation-Building and Education