Democracy at School

Project Overview

To what extent does the Cold War continue to shape contemporary politics, and what are its lasting legacies? This study examines the long-term effects of Cold War politics through a systematic analysis of secondary school textbooks produced during the era's authoritarian regimes, as well as surveys from post-transition countries. Focusing on two contrasting cases (South Korea's US-backed anti-communist regime and Poland's Soviet-supported communist regime), it offers the first comprehensive review of the full corpus of secondary-level history and social studies textbooks in both contexts. All materials have been digitized and are being pre-processed for machine learning to identify underlying narratives and patterns.

State of the Art

Our study builds upon and contributes to three strands of literature. First, we base our argument on research concerning authoritarian propaganda and legitimation. Authoritarian regimes employ three main strategies to maintain power: repression, cooptation, and legitimation (Gerschewski 2013). Among these, autocrats seek to legitimize their rule through indoctrination and information control, and education is widely used to inculcate regime messages among citizens (Paglayan 2022, 2024). For example, Paglayan (2022; 2024) finds that modern states expand education when mass violence threatens the regime, as schooling allows governments to teach pro-regime values, instill fear, and cultivate habits of compliance and deference to authority.

Education serves as an effective propaganda tool in three ways. First, in terms of depth, it can deliver an organized and systematic set of regime messages. Messages disseminated through other propaganda channels tend to be more scattered and less organized than educational content (Lee 2024). Second, its reach extends to nearly every corner of society through compulsory schooling, whereas other propaganda mechanisms may produce geographic disparities in exposure. Finally, school education targets students in their formative years, when critical political socialization occurs (Niemi and Sobieszek 1977; Neundorf and Smets 2016). Despite the importance of education as a tool for indoctrination, systematic analyses of school textbooks remain limited. This study contributes to the literature by examining the complete corpus of textbooks from two ideologically distinct authoritarian regimes.

Second, we situate our research within the literature on authoritarian attitudinal legacies (Neundorf and Pop-Eleches 2020; Pop-Eleches and Tucker 2017, 2020; Neundorf et al. 2020; Dinas and Northmore-Ball 2020). Previous studies find that citizens socialized under authoritarian rule exhibit distinct political attitudes and behaviors. For example, Pop-Eleches and Tucker (2017) find that post-communist citizens tend to be less supportive of democracy and market and more supportive of social welfare, due to beliefs shaped during the communist period. Dinas and Northmore-Ball (2020) suggest an opposing dynamic of authoritarian legacies, namely an anti-dictator bias, whereby post-transition citizens display a negative bias toward the ideology promoted by the former regime.

While it is undeniable that authoritarian socialization has long-term effects on post-transition societies, the precise mechanisms remain unclear. Early-life socialization is important, but why does counter-socialization not occur after a democratic transition? Why do some societies reject their authoritarian past entirely after a democratic transition, while others do not? How do patterns of rejection or acceptance shape post-transition attitudinal legacies? By closely examining regime messages and connecting them to post-transition outcomes, this study seeks to clarify the mechanisms of political socialization.

Finally, we engage with the literature on civic culture. We do not claim that institutional changes have no effect on people's behavior, but rather that such changes do not automatically transform authoritarian cultural legacies. We argue that democratic norms are a byproduct of institutional arrangements, not the other way around (Schmitter and Karl 1991; Rustow 1970). Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that prolonged exposure to authoritarian education socializes citizens to adopt values that do not easily change following institutional reform. Although these values may not be the primary determinants of democracy, they continue to influence political behavior. We also do not claim that values formed during one's formative years are unchangeable. Instead, we argue that developing a robust civic and democratic education curriculum after a transition is essential for the consolidation of democracy. In doing so, we aim to reconcile the tension between culturalist and institutionalist approaches.

Case Selection and Research Design

This research follows a two-step design. The first phase adopts an inductive approach, analyzing a large corpus of textbooks to identify similarities and differences between communist and anti-communist messages and to develop a novel theory of propaganda and legitimation under both regimes. We pay particular attention to regimes' state-building visions, which are incorporated into their regime legitimation messages. While messages from communist regimes have been widely studied, those from anti-communist regimes have received less attention, as they tend to lack ideological coherence and often rely on the imposition of external threats for legitimization. Nevertheless, the legitimizing messages of anti-communist regimes continue to influence citizens in certain parts of the world, including South Korea. Rather than assuming that anti-communist regime messages were less organized than their communist counterparts, this study seeks to compare how these regimes responded to communist messaging through counter-messaging strategies.

In the first phase, we will analyze the complete corpus of middle- and high-school textbooks produced under communist and anti-communist authoritarian rule. All materials have been digitized and pre-processed, enabling the use of contemporary computational text approaches to inductively recover each regime's legitimation strategies. Rather than relying on hand-coded categories or selectively chosen passages, we apply a pipeline that combines machine-learning classification with human-guided validation.

The pipeline proceeds in three steps. First, we will segment each textbook into analytically meaningful units (paragraphs or short passages) and identify high-salience language associated with state-building, obedience, national duty, security, economic performance, and anti-communism (for South Korea) or socialist morality and welfare provision (for Poland). Second, we use clustering and topic-modeling techniques to surface recurring themes and rhetorical patterns across textbooks. These methods allow us to identify the de facto “regime messages” that appear most consistently, even when not explicitly labeled as such. Third, we refine these inductively generated categories through supervised classification using hand-coded examples, ensuring transparency and interpretability. This hybrid approach of machine-guided discovery calibrated by expert input will allow us to map the full structure of each regime's state-building vision and legitimation repertoire.

Although the first phase is primarily theory-building, we formulate general expectations based on existing scholarship. We expect to find similar regime-legitimation messages that justify dictatorial rule in both countries. Such messages emphasize patriotism, loyalty to the state, and student discipline, fostering obedience to authority. In other words, both regimes use education as a state-building tool (Paglayan 2022, 2024). Second, we expect to observe both similarities and differences in how the role of the state is portrayed across policy areas. In both regimes, the provision of order and security is likely to be identified as one of the state's most important functions, reflecting their broader state-building efforts.

However, we expect that communist regimes will emphasize the provision of social welfare as a key duty of the state (Pop-Eleches and Tucker 2017), whereas anti-communist authoritarian regimes will highlight infrastructure and industrial development as central state responsibilities. While the former relies on social legitimacy, the latter emphasizes performance-based legitimacy. We acknowledge that non-communist authoritarian regimes constitute a broad category encompassing many different types of regimes, and their legitimation strategies may therefore vary widely. Nevertheless, we expect that these particular anti-communist regimes share a mission to counter the spread of communism by promoting strong anti-communist propaganda. A common message emphasizes performance-based legitimacy, highlighting economic achievements in contrast to communist regimes. Consequently, we expect to observe performance-based legitimation messages more often in anti-communist regimes. In short, we examine the educational content of both types of regimes during the Cold War to understand their convergent and divergent visions of state-building.

The second phase tests this theory using survey instruments to examine the long-term effects of these messages on the political attitudes of post-transition citizens.

We expect that divergent visions of authoritarian state-building and legitimation create different expectations about the role of the state. We argue that these expectations do not easily change after a transition to democracy. First, expectations about the role of government serve as a subtle form of authoritarian messaging, meaning that citizens may internalize these messages without critically evaluating them or connecting them to the authoritarian regime. Second, such expectations help foster a civic culture that can be transmitted across generations, shaping citizens' political behavior, including how they identify the most important policy areas and/or evaluate policies.

We will also examine factors that may mitigate or amplify the effects of authoritarian indoctrination on citizens. One such factor is religion. Churches play an important role in socialization and often compete with the regime's indoctrination efforts (Neundorf and Pop-Eleches 2020). In some regions of Poland, church influence was weaker than in others (Nalepa and Pop-Eleches 2022), which we can account for in our survey analysis. Geography is another factor. In some regions, regime messages were more effective and resonant when accompanied by material benefits. In others that experienced large-scale violence under authoritarian rule, such experiences may have undermined the regime's indoctrination efforts. Age is also important. Certain age cohorts were direct targets of authoritarian socialization, while younger generations educated under democratic systems are likely to exhibit weaker effects of such indoctrination. We also examine post-transition memory politics. Following regime change, there are often efforts to construct narratives that evoke authoritarian nostalgia. We expect that individuals most deeply affected by authoritarian socialization will be the primary consumers of such memory politics. We will account for these factors in our survey design.

In our survey, we test whether the legitimation messages recovered in phase one continue to resonate with post-transition citizens experimentally to ensure the causal link. For each authoritarian-era message, we construct a democratic-era analogue expressing the same policy domain or value dimension but grounded in democratic norms. Respondents evaluate the appropriateness or desirability of each statement for contemporary society. This approach allows us to directly observe whether citizens find authoritarian-era messages normatively acceptable, persuasive, or reflective of their own expectations about governance. Because both the authoritarian and democratic statements are matched in length, domain, and linguistic tone, differences in evaluation can be attributed to the underlying political logic rather than surface characteristics. The design is fully randomized, enabling comparisons across (1) within-cohort effects, (2) post-transition cohorts, and (3) intergenerational transmission.

Chapter Outline

1. 1

   is an introductory chapter that outlines our argument and theoretical claims, framing the question of how Cold War–era authoritarian education continues to shape political attitudes after democratization.

2. 2

   introduces the two cases, South Korea and Poland, discussing why we pick these two cases: their contrasting Cold War authoritarian regimes, similar paths to democratization, and the post-democratization political environment in each.

3. 3

   situates the study in the literature on authoritarian propaganda and legitimation, authoritarian attitudinal legacies, and civic culture, and sets up the tension between culturalist and institutionalist accounts of political change.

4. 4

   is the theory-building chapter. Using the computational pipeline described above, we analyze the complete corpus of communist- and anti-communist-era textbooks to recover each regime's legitimation strategies and build the authoritarian message profiles that anchor the book's theory.

5. 5

   is the theory-testing chapter. Using the survey experiment, we test whether the authoritarian-era messages recovered in Chapter 4 continue to resonate with post-transition citizens, comparing effects within cohorts, across post-transition cohorts, and across generations.

6. 6

   theorizes how these results add up to a civic culture in each country, drawing on the survey data to assess how religion, geography, age, and post-transition memory politics mitigate or amplify the effects of authoritarian indoctrination.

7. 7

   is the concluding chapter, comparing South Korea's and Poland's trajectories of democratic consolidation and drawing out the implications for post-transition civic education reform.

Policy Implications

This study has important policy implications. First, it examines how authoritarian indoctrination shapes the long-term political attitudes of post-transition citizens, showing that persistent authoritarian values can impede democratic consolidation. In our book's final chapter, we compare both countries' trajectories, highlighting periods of stagnation or backsliding and arguing that enduring attitudinal legacies are a key factor. This underscores the need for post-transition civic education reforms to foster democratic values. Second, by analyzing two distinct Cold War regimes and their textbook messaging, we propose a novel theory of regime propaganda, offering data that enrich broader understandings of Cold War and post–Cold War politics.

References

1. Dinas, Elias, and Ksenia Northmore-Ball. 2020. “The ideological shadow of authoritarianism.” Comparative Political Studies 53(12): 1957–1991.
2. Gerschewski, J. 2013. “The three pillars of stability: legitimation, repression, and co-optation in autocratic regimes.” Democratization 20(1): 13–38. doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2013.738860
3. Lee, Myunghee. 2024. “Authoritarianism at school: Indoctrination education, political socialisation, and citizenship in North Korea.” Asian Studies Review 48(2): 231–249.
4. Nalepa, Monika, and Grigore Pop-Eleches. 2022. “Authoritarian infiltration of organizations: causes and consequences.” The Journal of Politics 84(2): 861–873.
5. Neundorf, Anja, and Kaat Smets. 2016. “Political Socialisation and the Making of Citizens.” Oxford Handbooks Online.
6. Neundorf, Anja, and Grigore Pop-Eleches. 2020. “Dictators and their subjects: Authoritarian attitudinal effects and legacies.” Comparative Political Studies 53(12): 1839–1860.
7. Neundorf, Anja, Johannes Gerschewski, and Roman-Gabriel Olar. 2020. “How do inclusionary and exclusionary autocracies affect ordinary people?” Comparative Political Studies 53(12): 1890–1925.
8. Niemi, Richard G., and Barbara I. Sobieszek. 1977. “Political socialization.” Annual Review of Sociology 3: 209–233.
9. Paglayan, Agustina S. 2022. “Education or indoctrination? The violent origins of public school systems in an era of state-building.” American Political Science Review 116(4): 1242–1257.
10. Paglayan, Agustina. 2024. Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education. Princeton University Press.
11. Pop-Eleches, Grigore, and Joshua A. Tucker. 2017. Communism's Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes. Princeton University Press.
12. Pop-Eleches, Grigore, and Joshua A. Tucker. 2020. “Communist legacies and left-authoritarianism.” Comparative Political Studies 53(12): 1861–1889.
13. Rustow, Dankwart A. 1970. “Transitions to democracy: Toward a dynamic model.” Comparative Politics 2(3): 337–363.
14. Schmitter, Philippe C., and Terry Lynn Karl. 1991. “What democracy is… and is not.” Journal of Democracy 2(3): 75–88.