Are There Civic Returns to Education?

Political scientists generally support the view that education is effective at promoting the quantity and quality of civic participation. This study attempts to construct less ambiguous empirical evidence on this issue by identifying the causal effects of additional schooling on civic behaviors and knowledge. The research designs adopted here essentially parallel the extensive, empirical literature on the labor-market returns to schooling. More specifically, these inferences rely critically on instrumental variables that generated possibly exogenous variation in individual levels of schooling but that should otherwise be unrelated to adult civic outcomes.