Less developed regions have experienced massive increases in both education and democracy over the past half century, and it is widely claimed that many recent democratic transitions have been propelled by increasingly educated youth populations. Scholars have also speculated about education's social and political impacts, variously arguing that…

A randomized evaluation suggests that a program which provided official textbooks to randomly selected rural Kenyan primary schools did not increase test scores for the average student. In contrast, the previous literature suggests that textbook provision has a large impact on test scores. Disaggregating the results by students' initial academic…