The Anti-Left Legacy of the Pinochet Dictatorship

Educational systems can serve as powerful tools for attempted authoritarian indoctrination. What is the legacy of education under authoritarianism, and does it persist after the regime ends? We exploit a discrete change in the school curriculum generated by the Chilean 1973 coup. After the coup, the military junta overhauled the curriculum to align with its ideology. We use a regression discontinuity to compare people who were barely exposed to this new curriculum to those whose education ended before the reform. Results indicate that being educated under the junta-controlled system had a lasting impact on political ideology; we find a negative effect on left self-identification, a null effect on both right-wing and centrist self-identification, and a positive, albeit imprecise, effect on non-ideological identification. Effects are driven by those without a college education. We explore potential mechanisms, finding suggestive evidence that indoctrination may have both persuaded some to reject leftist platforms and increased ideological ambivalence and political apathy.