In our society, it is often said that education is a necessity for democracy to flourish. This makes sense, since better education means that populations are more aware about the world and can therefore contribute more meaningfully to their society by electing leaders whom they think are best. On the website Gapminder, when the adult literacy rate is plotted against the Democracy Index (EIU) for many different countries, there is a positive linear relationship between the two variables.
Although there does appear to be a relationship between adult literacy and Democracy, it is not very strong, and what I found quite surprising is that the distribution of countries on this plot is more resemblant of a right triangle than a line. There are plenty of countries which have had very high literacy rates over the years, but a low Democracy Index. For example, Uzbekistan in 2010 had a literacy rate of almost 100%, but a democracy index of less than 20. Because it is often thought that authoritarian regimes suppress education of its population in order to maintain power, I expected the correlation to be much stronger.
Despite the unexpected pattern in the relationship between adult literacy and democracy, there is a logical explanation. First of all, literacy is only a small component of education; it is very well possible for a country to educate its population on how to read without teaching them about the world, preventing the citizens from being able to truly understand their political situation. Therefore, literacy rate itself is not an accurate measure of a country’s overall education. In addition, as discussed by Amartya Sen and Owen Barder, there is much complexity and numerous factors at play when it comes to democracy, so it makes sense the relationship was not a straight line. Countries like Uzbekistan have numerous other issues that contribute to their lack of Democracy. Furthermore, as observed here in the United States recently, the literacy of the population can be exploited by the media through misinformation, which as we saw with the January 6th riots can pose a serious threat to democracy. Evidently, literacy itself is insufficient to evaluate the democratic situation of a particular country.
Because the relationship between a country’s literacy rate and its Democracy Index was much weaker than I expected, I think it provides valuable insight into the complex, nonlinear nature of the world. It is clear that we cannot evaluate one particular aspect of a country based on a single other factor nor a simple linear relationship, rather we must consider the underlying complexity at play in order to better understand what’s going on.