Effects of Education on Political Perspectives in Haiti

Abstract

This dissertation explores the influence of education in general, and post-secondary education in particular, on the political views and values of Haitian adults. I ask two questions. First, does education produce an inclination towards democratic values? Second, does education produce a shift of values from survival to self-expression? I draw on the work of Lipset (1959) and the literature on political socialization to build my theory. I argue that 1) education makes individuals more supportive of democracy and 2) education produces a shift to self-expression values. To assess these arguments, I take a mixed methods approach. I use interviews with university students and original data from the World Values Survey fielded in Haiti. Most notably, the strongest support for democracy on the democracy-autocracy scale was from those who had graduated from a university preparatory high school program and had not attended post-secondary education and those who had graduated from university. Those who partially completed higher education were the most supportive of autocracy. Findings related to self-expression values were inconclusive, and I discuss the need for further research to evaluate this claim. There are three key implications of this research. First, encouraging the completion of higher education can have pro-democracy implications and partial completion of higher education can be counterproductive. Second, education has an impact on views, and thus should be taken seriously by those interested in influencing them. Lastly, institutions interested in advancing democratic values can do so through investment in education.