The Heinz I. Eulau Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best article published in the APSA journal American Political Science Review.
Agustina S. Paglayan is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development. She studies what motivates politicians to expand educational access and provide high-quality education, as well as the long-term repercussions of education policy choices. She is the author of “Education or Indoctrination? The Violent Origins of Public School Systems in an Era of State-Building,” winner of the 2023 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review in 2022. In the same journal she has also published “The Non-Democratic Roots of Mass Education: Evidence from 200 Years,” which received awards from APSA’s Political Economy, Politics and History, Democracy and Autocracy, and Public Policy Sections. Paglayan’s interdisciplinary research builds on her academic and professional experiences: she holds a PhD in Political Science and an MA in Education Policy from Stanford University, an MPP from Georgetown University, a Licenciatura en Economia from Universidad de San Andres in Argentina, and before becoming a professor, worked on education reform and poverty reduction in developing countries. Paglayan’s book explaining the emergence, expansion, and characteristics of public school systems in Western societies is forthcoming with Princeton University Press.
Citation from the Award Committee:
“Education or Indoctrination? The Violent Origins of Public School Systems in an Era of State-Building” is a path-breaking article that locates the origins of mass education systems in the conflictual process of state-building. Paglayan builds on a research agenda, which she developed in earlier work, locating the origins of educational expansion in the pre-democratic political context. This paper substantially advances our theories about the politics of educational expansion by reconceptualizing its purpose. Paglayan argues that state actors saw educational expansion not primarily as a distributive good or a source of human capital development, but as a form of indoctrination that had the potential to strengthen social control. This perspective on education yields a series of new hypotheses about the timing of expansion and the siting of educational institutions, that break with classic political economy approaches that had focused on local systems of production or electoral institutions.
The paper combines these theoretical claims with two original historical datasets, one cross-national dataset on mass primary school expansion and a second detailed dataset on the geographic structure of expansion in Chile. Paglayan shows that, in the wake of civil wars, leaders invested in education. Through the Chilean case, she argues that the government deliberately cited educational institutions in areas of rebel dominance as a tool to create more political order. The paper is notable for its clear and careful theorization alongside its creative use of original data. The paper provides important new resources to scholars asking critical questions about the nature of public goods provision and political order, through careful engagement with, and production of, historical data. In sum, the paper provides crucial insights into the origins of mass education systems and spurs on an important new research agenda.
APSA thanks Cambridge University Press for its support of the award and the committee members for their service: Dr. Jane R. Gingrich (chair) of the University of Oxford, Dr. Paul S. Herrnson of the University of Connecticut, and Dr. Elizabeth Maggie Penn of Emory University.
a similar argument was made in 1964 by the Weberian sociologist Reinhard Bendix in a great book Nation-building and citizenship.