Research

Master’s thesis. The Politics of Non-Formal Education: A Study of the Short-Term Political Effects of the Spanish Pedagogical Missions During the 1930s. Link to thesis

ABSTRACT. To what extent can non-formal educational policies contribute to increasing political support for the incumbent regime? In this study, I analyze the short-term political consequences of the Pedagogical Missions, a non-formal educational and cultural policy carried out by the government of the Second Spanish Republic between 1931 and 1936. Empirically, I exploit a municipal-level dataset on all the destinations of the Pedagogical Missions between 1931 and 1934, combined with new data on electoral results from 1931 and 1933 for a sample of municipalities from central Spain. I construct several DiD models to examine if the Missions carried out between 1931 and 1933 had any effect on the change in turnout rates and vote shares for socialist and republican parties between the 1931 and 1933 general elections, which I take as indicators of political support towards the Republican regime. Results are partially aligned with some of my expectations. Although I find no evidence of an effect of the Pedagogical Missions on turnout, I do find partial evidence of a positive effect on socialist and republican vote shares. This effect is clearer when considering broad treatment areas based on distance to a mission site, and it is stronger in municipalities where support for the Republic was initially weaker. After analyzing different potential mechanisms, I claim that these findings may suggest that the Pedagogical Missions could have worked mainly by reducing existing negative political opinions, or “biases” against the Republic in targeted areas.