Abstract
There is scant systematic empirical evidence on what explains variation in academic freedom. Making use of a new indicator and panel data covering 64 countries 1960–2017, we investigate how de facto academic freedom is affected by, in particular, political institutions. We find that moving to electoral democracy is positive, as is moving to electoral autocracy from other autocratic systems, suggesting the importance of elections. Communism has a strongly detrimental effect. Legislatures that are bicameral are associated with more academic freedom, while legislatures that become more diverse and more ideologically to the right also seem to stimulate this type of freedom. Presidentialism and coups do not appear to matter much, while more proportional electoral systems strengthen academic freedom. More judicial accountability stimulates academic freedom, and richer countries experience more of it. The results suggest that the political sphere exerts a clear but complex influence on the degree to which scholarly activities are free.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Availability of data and material
Data are provided on request.
Code availability (software application or custom code)
Stata codes are available on request.
Notes
A few key events can be mentioned: The issuing by Frederick I in the 1150 s of the Privilegium Scholasticum, the founding of the University of Leiden in 1575 and the inclusion of article 20 in the Prussian constitution of 1848 stating that “[s]cience and its teachings shall be free”.
We consider the following definition from The Lima Declaration on Academic Freedom and Autonomy of Institutions of Higher Education (Fernando, 1989, p. 50) to be useful: “‘Academic freedom’ means the freedom of members of the academic community, individually or collectively, in the pursuit, development and transmission of knowledge, through research, study, discussion, documentation, production, creation, teaching, lecturing and writing”. For more on the history and concept of academic freedom, see, e.g., Machlup (1955), Altbach (2001) and Karran (2009).
The existing literature on factors influencing academic freedom mainly comprises qualitative discussions or limited studies of particular cases or countries. For example, vommercial academic-industry relationships do not seem to reduce academic freedom (Behrens & Gray, 2001; Streiffer, 2006); government research assessments appear to have detrimental effects on academic freedom (Martin-Sardesai et al., 2017); communism has impeded academic freedom in Polish sociology (Kwasniewicz, 1994); and the authoritarian cultures of many Muslim-majority countries has been detrimental for academic freedom (Kraince, 2008).
Leighton and López (2014) show how academics often can influence reform paths by providing alternatives to the prevailing ideas that are available to political decision-makers at critical junctures.
The conclusion applies to scholars whose work is relevant for politics, in particular those in the social sciences and humanities, and not so much to scholars in the natural sciences. Hence, political decision-makers can champion academic freedom for the latter, while at the same time wanting to restrict, or actually restrict, the academic freedom of those who are seen as threats to their position of power or their ideological goals. Unfortunately, the data do not specify how academic freedom varies between academic disciplines, so we cannot test for such differential effects in our empirical analyses.
Evidence has been reported that fair and free elections can discipline political decision-makers when it comes to economic policy matters, arguably having those decisions conform more to the public interest (Collier & Hoeffler, 2015), if it were possible to identify what that may be.
Effects of (changes in) political institutions can be of a short- and a long-term kind: the former reflecting “immediate” adjustments and the latter incorporating settled equilibrium effects. We do not have particular theoretically based expectations about the temporal or dynamic character of how political institutions influence academic freedom but consider it an important issue to study empirically, and we do so below. Moreover, the effects can also differ within democracies and within autocracies, as well as between them, which is why we also report interactions between the system of government and a number of political institutions below.
The V-Dem indicators are based on expert assessments. Other measures of academic freedom are available, including one focusing on legal protections of institutional autonomy and tenure within EU countries (Karran, 2007; Karran et al., 2017); survey data on how academics themselves perceive academic freedom at UK universities (Karran & Millinson, 2019); and an expert-assessment indicator by Freedom House (2020). Limitations of the last dataset are a primary focus on political expression (and not only in higher education), and omission of a measure of the freedom to do research (rather than teaching).
See Spannagel et al. (2020, pp. 7–10) for detailed descriptions of the five indicators. In addition, V-Dem contains data on two other indicators of academic freedom that capture the de jure status of academic freedom: “Constitutional Protection of Academic Freedom”, and “International Legal Commitment to Academic Freedom Under ICESCR [International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights].” However, we do not consider them in our study.
The freedom of expression index, which was suggested to us by a reviewer, is the average of V-Dem’s indicators of government censorship efforts, harassment of journalists, media self-censorship, freedom of discussion, media bias, critical media, entry and exit of civil society organizations, and repression of such organizations, on a 0–1 scale.
As a way of illustrating the magnitudes of the correlations, they are quite similar to the standard correlations found between income per capita and measures of property rights protection, corruption and general governance quality. Those correlations generally are thought to reflect overall, long-run transition processes rather than any conceptual or practical identity between income and institutions (cf. Paldam 2021). Additionally, it may be worth noting that in approximately 10% of all country-year observations within our sample, assessments of academic freedom and overall freedom of expression move in opposite directions.
Error-correction models offer a good solution to some of the potential problems, but they are not perfect solutions to problems of endogeneity and simultaneity bias. While they do yield relatively unbiased long-run estimates if the exact sequence of events operates in a Granger-causal way, they remain sensitive to bias owing to anticipation effects and measurement problems, although such problems can lead to both positive and negative biases. When, for example, coders are conservative and change their assessments of academic freedom only after observing a stable change, error-correction models will underestimate short-run effects. Conversely, if coders rely on clues from other institutional changes – for example, if they expect democratization eventually to lead to more academic freedom – such changes will be coded too early and tend to overestimate short-run effects. As we have no way of solving these problems because finding instruments for all possible changes is impossible and the application of GMM estimators is practically problematic with variables that change episodically and remain stable between episodes, we caution against interpreting the results without due care.
More specifically, according to Cheibub et al. (2010, p. 69): “A regime is classified as a democracy if it meets the requirements stipulated in all of the following four rules: 1. The chief executive must be chosen by popular election or by a body that was itself popularly elected. 2. The legislature must be popularly elected. 3. There must be more than one party competing in the elections. 4. An alternation in power under electoral rules identical to the ones that brought the incumbent to office must have taken place.”.
To illustrate that our dichotomous democracy indicator does not by definition entail academic freedom, we note that undemocratic Burkina Faso and Togo have had academic freedom scores of 0.85 and 0.75, respectively, in recent years, which is equivalent to or substantially higher than democracies such as Ecuador (at 0.75) and Guinea (0.56).
As noted in previous research using the ideology data, we often code some parties defining themselves as “right-wing” at different positions than determined by their official ideological locations. Examples include the French Rassemblement National, which we code as reformed socialist based on its economic policy preferences, and the Danish People’s Party, which we code as social democratic.
One might see the question as one of political intervention in academia and therefore prefer a measure of judicial independence, which conceptually is distinct from that of judicial accountability. In additional tests (available on request), we nevertheless find very similar patterns when using the V-Dem measures of judicial independence. That is not surprising, given the large positive correlation between the measures. We take both to indicate the integrity of the legal system.
We tried entering education, measured as either the average years of schooling or the share of the population with at least a secondary education, in the regressions, but the coefficient always is virtually zero and statistically insignificant. Similarly, we have experimented with separating non-democracies into civilian and military types instead of single- and multi-party autocracies, but we find no clear differences between the two.
A parallel problem applies to GMM estimators for addressing causality. In situations in which changes in the dependent variable are distinct events while the regime remains stable over long periods of time between those events, lagged levels of regime status tend to be statistically strong predictors of levels, while lagged changes in the independent variables provide very little information about the events. In practice, the particular structure of our data invalidates the use of GMM estimators.
The only clear example in Fig. 4 of academic freedom increasing prior to a regime transition is with transition from a single-party regime to full democracy. Those transitions essentially all are post-communist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. A complication with the regime data in those specific cases is that a number of the countries – most clearly in the Baltic region – started their transitions to effective independence prior to holding their first democratic elections as independent nations. The Bjørnskov-Rode dataset counts them as democratic only after a democratic election that results in a change of government control; hence, in a real sense our data source locates the democratic transition one or 2 years later than the de facto transition occurred.
In an additional test, we also distinguish the effects of judicial accountability in autocracies and democracies. However, although the difference is statistically significant and judicial accountability is more important in democracies, the difference is quite small.
References
Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., & Robinson, J. A. (2005). Institutions as the fundamental cause of long-run growth. In P. Aghion & S. N. Durlauf (Eds.), Handbook of economic growth (Vol. 1B, pp. 385–472). Elsevier.
Aghion, P., Dewatripont, M., & Stein, J. C. (2008). Academic freedom, private-sector focus and the process of innovation. RAND Journal of Economics, 39(3), 617–635.
Altbach, P. G. (2001). Academic freedom: International realities and challenges. Higher Education, 41(1–2), 205–219.
Andreescu, L. (2009). Foundations of academic freedom: Making new sense of some aging arguments. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 28(6), 499–515.
Behrens, T. R., & Gray, D. O. (2001). Unintended consequences of cooperative research: Impact of industry sponsorship on climate for academic freedom and other graduate student outcome. Research Policy, 30(2), 179–199.
Bennett, D. L., Bjørnskov, C., & Gohmann, S. F. (2021). Coups, regime transitions and institutional consequences. Journal of Comparative Economics, 49(2), 627–643.
Berggren, N., & Bjørnskov, C. (2017). The market-promoting and market-preserving role of social trust in reforms of policies and institutions. Southern Economic Journal, 84(1), 3–25.
Berggren, N., & Karlson, N. (2003). Constitutionalism, division of power and transaction costs. Public Choice, 117(1–2), 99–124.
Bjørnskov, C., & Rode, M. (2020). Regime types and regime change: A new dataset on democracy, coups and political institutions. Review of International Organizations, 15(2), 531–551.
Blume, L., Müller, J., Voigt, S., & Wolf, C. (2009). The economic effects of constitutions: Replicating–and extending–Persson and Tabellini. Public Choice, 139(1–2), 197–225.
Brambor, T., Clark, W. R., & Golder, M. (2006). Understanding interaction models: Improving empirical analyses. Political Behavior, 14(1), 63–82.
Cheibub, J. A., Gandhi, J., & Vreeland, J. R. (2010). Democracy and dictatorship revisited. Public Choice, 143(1–2), 67–101.
Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (2015). Do elections matter for economic performance? Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 77(1), 1–21.
Coppedge, M., Gerring, J., Knutsen, C.H., Lindberg, S.I., Teorell, J., Altman, D., Bernhard, M., Fish, M.S., Glynn, A., Hicken, A., Lührmann, A., Marquardt, K.L., McMann, K., Paxton, P., Pemstein, D., Seim, B., Sigman, R., Skaaning, S.-E., Staton, J., Cornell, A., Gastaldi, L., Gjerløw, H., Mechkova, V., von Römer, J., Sundtröm, A., Tzelgov, E., Uberti, L., Wang, Y.-t., Wig, T., Ziblatt, D., 2020b. V-Dem Codebook v10. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project, Gothenburg. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3557877
Crawford, J. T., & Pilanski, J. M. (2014). Political intolerance, right and left. Political Psychology, 35(6), 841–851.
De Boef, S. L., & Keele, L. (2008). Taking time seriously. American Journal of Political Science, 52(1), 184–200.
Dewey, J. (1902). Academic freedom. Educational Review, 23(1), 1–14.
Dworkin, R. (1996). We need a new interpretation of academic freedom. Academe, 8(3), 10–15.
Eicher, T. S., García-Peñalosa, C., & Kuenzel, D. J. (2018). Constitutional rules as determinants of social infrastructure. Journal of Macroeconomics, 57(September), 182–209.
Feenstra, R. C., Inklaar, R., & Timmer, M. P. (2015). The next generation of the Penn World Table. American Economic Review, 105(10), 3150–3182.
Fernando, L. (1989). The Lima declaration on academic freedom and autonomy of institutions of higher education. Higher Education Policy, 2(1), 49–51.
House, F. (2020). Freedom in the world 2020. Freedom House.
Karran, T. (2007). Academic freedom in Europe: A preliminary comparative analysis. Higher Education Policy, 20(3), 289–313.
Karran, T. (2009). Academic freedom: In justification of a universal ideal. Studies in Higher Education, 34(3), 263–283.
Karran, T., Beiter, K., & Appiagyei-Atua, K. (2017). Measuring academic freedom in Europe: A criterion referenced approach. Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 1(2), 209–239.
Karran, T., & Millinson, L. (2019). Academic freedom and world-class universities: A virtuous circle? Higher Education Policy, 32(3), 397–417.
Klein, D. B. (2009). Resorting to statism to find meaning: Conservatism and leftism. Society, 46(2), pp. 137–146.
Kraince, R. (2008). Academic freedom in Muslim societies. International Higher Education, 51, 5–6.
Kurrild-Klitgaard, P., & Berggren, N. (2004). Economic consequences of constitutions: A theory and survey. Journal Des Économistes Et Des Études Humaines, 14(1), 3–42.
Kwasniewicz, W. (1994). Dialectics of systemic constraint and academic freedom: Polish sociology under socialist regime. In M. F. Keen & J. Mucha (Eds.), Eastern Europe in transformation: The impact on sociology (pp. 25–38). Greenwood Press.
Leighton, W. A., & López, E. J. (2014). Madmen, intellectuals and academic scribblers: The economic engine of political change. Stanford University Press.
Machlup, F. (1955). On some misconceptions concerning academic freedom. Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (1915–1955), 41(4), 753–784.
Martin-Sardesai, A., Irvine, H., Tooley, S., & Guthrie, J. (2017). Government research evaluations and academic freedom: A UK and Australian comparison. Higher Education Research and Development, 36(2), 372–385.
McCloskey, D. N. (2006). The bourgeois virtues: Ethics for an age of commerce. University of Chicago Press.
Mill, J. S. (1859). On liberty. John W Parker and Son.
Mokyr, J. (2012). The enlightened economy: An economic history of Britain 1700–1850. Yale University Press.
Moodie, G. C. (1996). On justifying the different claims to academic freedom. Minerva, 34(2), 129–150.
Mukand, S. W., & Rodrik, D. (2020). The political economy of liberal democracy. Economic Journal, 130(627), 765–792.
Paldam, M. (2021). The grand pattern of development and the transition of institutions. Cambridge University Press.
Paldam, M., & Gundlach, E. (2018). Jumps into democracy: Integrating the short and the long run in the democratic transition. Kyklos, 71(3), 456–481.
Persson, T., & Tabellini, G. (2003). The economic effects of constitutions. MIT Press.
Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Routledge.
Smith, S. A. (Ed.). (2014). The Oxford handbook of the history of communism. Oxford University Press.
Spannagel, J., Kinzelbach, K., & Saliba, I. (2020). The academic freedom index and other new indicators relating to academic space: An introduction. V-Dem Working Paper 2020:26. Retrieved from V-Dem: 1 June 2020 https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/0d/a3/0da3981c-86ab-4d4f-b809-5bb77f43a0c7/wp_spannagel2020.pdf .
Streiffer, R. (2006). Academic freedom and academic-industry relationships in biotechnology. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 16(2), 129–149.
Tsebelis, G. (1995). Decision making in political systems: Veto players in presidentialism, parliamentarism, multicameralism and multipartyism. British Journal of Political Science, 25(3), 289–325.
Voigt, S. (2008). The economic effects of judicial accountability: Cross-country evidence. European Journal of Law and Economics, 25(2), 95–123.
Voigt, S. (2020). Constitutional economics: A primer. Cambridge University Press.
Zakaria, F. (1997). The rise of illiberal democracy. Foreign Affairs, 76(6), 22–43.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Andreas Bergh, Niels-Hugo Blunch, Jerg Gutmann, Martin Paldam and Martin Rode for helpful comments.
Funding
Financial support from Johan och Jakob Söderbergs stiftelse (grant FA20-0001), the Czech Science Foundation (GA ČR, grant 19-03102S) and Jan Wallanders och Tom Hedelius Stiftelse (grants P18-0162, P19-0180) is gratefully acknowledged. This paper is also part of the Future of Free Speech Project, directed by Justitia in Copenhagen.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declared no potential conflict of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Berggren, N., Bjørnskov, C. Political institutions and academic freedom: evidence from across the world. Public Choice 190, 205–228 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-021-00931-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-021-00931-9