Replication Data for: Schools of Thought: Leader Education and Policy Outcomes

We develop and test a leader-specific theory of economic and political liberalization. We argue that leaders' policy decisions while in office depend, in part, on their exposure to classical liberal values while at university, through the content of social science and humanities courses. To measure and explain institutional variation in the strength and emphasis on student education in social sciences and humanities, we align educational models along a two-dimensional typology. The first dimension determines a school's ability to develop excellence in the social sciences and humanities, while the second dimension reinforces/hinders students' ability to internalize the content of classes offered in these fields. Using a novel dataset on international leaders' educational attainment and specialization, we show that leaders who attended Anglo-American universities are more likely to implement liberal policies across a number of issue areas, such as trade and financial liberalization, judicial independence, human rights protections, and democratic reform.