Replication Data for: The Anti-Left Legacy of the Pinochet Dictatorship

Educational systems can serve as powerful tools for attempted authoritarian indoctrination. What is the legacy of education under authoritarianism, and does it persist after the regime ends? We exploit a discrete change in the school curriculum generated by the Chilean 1973 coup. After the coup, the military junta overhauled the curriculum to align with its ideology. We use a regression discontinuity to compare people who were barely exposed to this new curriculum to those whose education ended before the reform. Results indicate that being educated under the junta-controlled system had a lasting impact on political ideology; we find a negative effect on left self-identification, a null effect on both right-wing and centrist self-identification, and a positive, albeit imprecise, effect on non-ideological identification. Effects are driven by those without a college education. We explore potential mechanisms, finding suggestive evidence that indoctrination may have both persuaded some to reject leftist platforms and increased ideological ambivalence and political apathy.

教育体系可成为威权主义灌输企图的强力工具。威权体制下的教育留下了何种遗产，且该遗产是否会在政权终结后仍持续存在？我们借助1973年智利政变（Chilean 1973 Coup）所引发的学校课程离散性变革展开研究。政变后，军政府对课程体系进行全面改革，以契合其意识形态主张。我们采用断点回归设计（Regression Discontinuity），将几乎未接触新课程的群体与改革前便结束学业的群体进行对比。研究结果显示，在军政府管控的教育体系下接受教育，会对个体的政治意识形态产生持久影响：我们发现其对左翼自我认同存在显著负向影响，对右翼及中间派自我认同均无显著影响，而对非意识形态化自我认同则存在正向（尽管估计精度不足）影响。上述效应仅存在于未接受高等教育的群体中。我们进一步探究了潜在作用机制，结果发现有提示性证据表明，这种灌输行为既可能促使部分群体拒绝左翼政治主张，也加剧了意识形态上的矛盾心态与政治冷漠。