Learning democracy: The lasting effects of political education on democratic support

Abstract Do citizens need to grow up in a democracy to value it? We examine how school education – democratic or authoritarian – shapes long-term support for democracy. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment in the former German Democratic Republic, where rigid school entry rules and abrupt reforms after reunification created exogenous variation in exposure to socialist schooling, we show that an additional year of such education significantly reduced democratic support in adulthood. To test generalizability, we analyze harmonized survey data from 106 countries alongside new expert-coded measures of educational content and state effort. The results reveal that democratic attitudes are shaped not only by the negative imprint of authoritarian schooling but crucially by the positive imprint of democratic civic education, especially when democracies invest heavily in it. Our findings demonstrate that democracy must be learned to be valued, underscoring the central role of education in democratic consolidation and resilience.