Thomas R. Vargas

Forthcoming in Comparative Politics.

This repository holds the Rmarkdown script to reproduce "Decentralization as a Political Weapon: Education Politics in El Salvador and Paraguay" in its entirety.

Abstract: What explains why some governments advanced decentralized education in the 1990s while others shied away from such efforts? Some arguments suggest that decentralization was pursued to improve the coverage and quality of education. Others point to partisanship, ideology, or diffusion. Drawing on a case study of El Salvador and Paraguay, I argue instead that governments pursued education decentralization in part because it could be deployed as a political weapon to weaken teachers’ unions affiliated with the opposition, thus depressing mobilization and votes for their rivals. These findings contribute to the literature on decentralization by highlighting a new political motivation fueling decentralization efforts across the developing world—the demobilization of the opposition.

I thank Teri Caraway, Michelle Dion, John Freeman, Claire Le Barbenchon, Dave Lopez, Oanh Nguyen, Oscar Pocasange, David Samuels, Ben Ross Schneider, and two supportive and thorough anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to seminar participants at the University of Minnesota and Duke University, and audiences at APSA 2019 and MPSA 2018. My thanks to the University of Minnesota for research support and to the World Bank Archives for access to key material. Any remaining mistakes are my own.