Democracy and education expenditure visualised

(This work was done as a part of PhD coursework in the subject Mini Project-1 at IDC, IIT Bombay towards fulfilling the requirements of IITB-Monash Research Academy)

All governments spend a percentage of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education. This percentage differs across countries leading to different levels of education across the world. Expenditure in terms of percentage of GDP is only one factor that governs the level of education imparted to citizens of a country by their respective governments, and I would argue that it is a key factor worth exploring. Another potential factor affecting the level of education could be the type of government (regime). Over time, countries in the world have gone through changes with respect to forms of government, ranging from autocratic to democratic. Data suggests that liberal democracies of the world spend more on education as compared to other forms of governments (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Expenditure on education (% of GDP) by countries of the world grouped by the type of government (regime) for data from 1970 to 2019

Democratic governments are about elected representations, and education is the key catalyst in driving that representation. The level of education governs the capability of a country to make informed decisions. However, the level of education is uneven everywhere, as are the forms of government. I wanted to study the relation between the two and find out:

Do liberal democracies spend more on education (in terms of % of GDP) as compared to other forms of government?

Additionally, as an Indian citizen, another pertinent exploration in the domain of government and education is to look at the education expenditure trends in the country. It is known that different states spend a percentage of the State GDP, also known as Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP), on education. In this regard, I wanted to understand:

How does the expenditure on education of a particular state compare with the median of expenditure on education?

The answers to the above two questions are illustrated in this blog by visualising relevant data sets.

Visualisations on Flourish Studio

Disclaimers for interpreting the visualisations

1. For the world education expenditure visualisation, the current charts solely depend on the available data that was extracted from Our World in Data. There is a range of missing data which includes some countries; education expenditure data of some countries for some years; and regimes of some countries for some years. The current data set has full/partial information of 167 countries across the chosen timeline 1970–2019.
2. The data set containing regimes of different countries was a larger data set in terms of number of countries and number of years as compared to the data set containing the information on education expenditure of different countries. While merging the two data sets, only those countries and those years were considered for which information on education expenditure was available. This was to ensure that a relation between education and regime could be studied.
3. Since there was a range of missing data, the box plots which plotted the medians of expenditure on education for 167 countries might not be a true representation of medians for a particular year or regime. Although the graphs show some indicative trends, please interpret the visualisations cautiously.
4. For the case of India, the chart is solely based on the data set which included only 18 states. The median is purely based on the available data. Andhra Pradesh was an undivided state during the larger part of the period considered in the dataset.

Interactive visualisations

Note: The following visualisations use the same legend:
Circle = Closed autocracy; Cross = Electoral autocracy; Diamond = Electoral democracy; Wye = Liberal democracy

1. Box plots showing the relation between expenditure on education (% of GDP) and regime without time-slider (Fig. 2)

Click the link for interactive visualisation

This visualisation clearly shows the relation between the kind of regime and expenditure on education. Liberal democracies spend the highest with a median of 5.07, followed by electoral democracies with a median of 4.07, followed by electoral autocracies with a median of 3.48 and finally followed by closed autocracies with a median of 3.44. Since the difference between the medians is narrow, it cannot be concluded for certain that this is always the case.

Fig. 2: Box plots showing the relation between expenditure on education (% of GDP) and regime of the world without timeline series and regime filter

2. Box plots showing the relation between expenditure on education (% of GDP) and regime with time-slider (Fig. 3)

Click the link for interactive visualisation

For the major part of the timeline, the median of expenditure for closed autocracies ranged from 2–4%, except from 1997–2010, where certain spikes were observed. Also, the median of expenditure for electoral autocracies ranged from 2–4%, with few exceptions. The fluctuations in median of expenditure was the highest for electoral democracies as compared to the other three regimes for the given timeline. For almost the entire timeline, the median of expenditure for liberal democracies ranged from 4–6%, with very few exceptions, one in the year 1970 (3.82%) and the other in 1997 (6.16%).

Fig. 3: Box plots showing the relation between expenditure on education (% of GDP) and regime of the world with timeline series and regime filter

3. Expenditure on education (% of GDP) of different regimes in the world

Closed autocracy: Click the link for interactive visualisation

Electoral autocracy: Click the link for interactive visualisation

Electoral democracy (Fig. 4): Click the link for interactive visualisation

Liberal democracy: Click the link for interactive visualisation

This category of visualisations gives an option to study the region-wise trends in expenditure on education for a particular regime. It was generally observed that for electoral democracies in the world, the median of expenditure lies between 3% and 6%, which is quite a wide range. In the case of liberal democracies, it is quite narrow and it is between 4.5% and 5.5.%, with very few exceptions. Similar and other observations could be made from this and other visualisations of this category included in this blog.

Fig. 4: Electoral democracy: World expenditure on education (% of GDP) with continent/region filter

4. Expenditure on Education (% of GDP) of different continents/regions of the world

Africa: Click the link for interactive visualisation

Asia (Fig. 5): Click the link for interactive visualisation

Europe: Click the link for interactive visualisation

The Middle East: Click the link for interactive visualisation

North America: Click the link for interactive visualisation

Central America: Click the link for interactive visualisation

South America: Click the link for interactive visualisation

Oceania: Click the link for interactive visualisation

This category of visualisations gives an option to study the region-wise trends in expenditure on education irrespective of the regime. This was with the assumption that countries located in the same region in a continent might be influenced by similar geo-political and socio-cultural factors. The visualisation also shows the changes in regimes across the timeline. In the case of Asia, it could be observed that Japan is the only country that had liberal democracy throughout the chosen timeline and South Korea is another country which has moved to liberal democracy in 1993. The trend of increasing and decreasing expenditure is more or less equally divided in the continent. Most of the liberal democracies of the world are concentrated in Europe, out of which West Europe and North Europe (Scandinavian countries) have always been liberal democracies across the chosen timeline. Similar and other observations could be made from this and other visualisations of this category included in this blog.

Fig. 5: Asia: Expenditure on education (% of GDP) with region filter

5. India: Trends in state-wise expenditure on education (% of GSDP) (Fig. 6)

Click the link for interactive visualisation

This particular visualisation is a line-chart with an option of series filter. Using the filter option, one can compare one state with another state and/or the median across the chosen timeline. It was observed that the states that lie completely or almost above the median across the timeline were Assam, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Odisha and Rajasthan. The states that lie completely or almost below the median were Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Rest of the states, namely, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh intersect with the median line at different points.

Fig. 6: India: Trends in state-wise expenditure on education (% of GSDP) with state and median filter

Data collection, processing and visualisation

For the world education expenditure visualisation, two data sets were extracted from Our World in Data, one on education expenditure and other one on political regimes. Both the data sets were merged together and the final data set contained information of 167 countries across the time period 1970–2019. The data sets were initially processed and visualised using R software. After the initial observations on R, Datawrapper, Flourish Studio and Raw Graphs were explored for interactive visualisations. Flourish Studio was chosen for the final visualisations because of the wide range of chart options and better controls. Hans Rosling chart (scatter plots) was chosen to show change over the time period.

For the case of India, the data set was extracted from the research article by Mr Gunwant B Gadbade and Dr Chandrakant N Kokate. The paper was about an interstate analysis of public expenditure on education in India and the data set was available for 18 states and the time period 1990–2019, where the data for the year 2019 was projected data. In this case, Line chart (searchable) template was chosen on Flourish Studio to visualise the data set.

To know more about the process of data collection, processing and visualisations, follow my next blog.

Conclusion

Key takeaways

1. It was observed that even though data visualisation suggests that liberal democracies spend higher on education, the difference across medians of expenditure of different regimes is narrow. Therefore, it cannot be strongly concluded that regimes have an effect on education expenditure. There might be other factors worth exploring that could contribute to higher or lower expenditure on education.
2. Most of the liberal democracies of the world are concentrated in Europe.
3. In the case of India, there are almost equal numbers of states above and below the median of education expenditure. As compared to the percentage of GSDP spent on education, a better measure might be studying trends on per capita public education expenditure across a similar timeline for more useful insights.

Reflections

1. While visualising the data sets, one should be careful with the choice of chart for plotting data. Also, care should be taken while plotting the data on particular axes to find relevant correlation. Choice of filters also play a role in the interactivity of visualisations.
2. Data sorting (including checking for inconsistencies, cleaning up) is a vital step in the process before undertaking the exercise of data visualisation itself. Considerable time should be kept aside for this.
3. Availability of data points has a direct relationship with the medians plotted for data sets. For more meaningful visualisations, use of complete data sets is advisable.
4. Merging multiple data sets often leads to smaller resultant data sets due to limited overlaps. While choosing a research question, data availability itself can be a major constraint for data visualisation.

Useful links

Visualisation resources: Datawrapper, Flourish Studio, Raw Graphs

Data portals: Our World in Data ‘Global education’, Our World in Data ‘Democracy’, Research article by Mr Gunwant B Gadbade and Dr Chandrakant N Kokate

Data sets used for visualisations: Google Sheet

Coding on R: GitHub

Future work

1. The current study has not looked into the causal relationship between democracy and education. It was about visualisation on the basis of available data. Detailed causal relationships could be included in future studies, on the basis of observations made from these visualisations.
2. Other factors affecting expenditure on education could be included under the scope of future studies.
3. Future work could also include doing a few case-studies around important events which could be observed in the visualisations. These events could be war, global economic crisis and so on, which might have had an effect on the education expenditure of a particular country/region during a particular time period.
4. The visualisations were solely dependent on the features available on the free-version of Flourish Studio. Multiple forms of visualisation (for example, scatter plots and line charts) could not be included in the same visualisation for a richer interactive exploration of the data sets. Multiple visualisation charts and other mediums of visualisation could be explored in future.

Acknowledgements

I would sincerely like to thank Prof. Venkatesh Rajamanickam (IDC, IIT Bombay), Dr Arnab Jana (CUSE, IIT Bombay), Dr Ilya Fridman (MADA, Monash University) and Dr Xavier Ho (MADA, Monash University) in helping me with great deal of resources, giving me extremely valuable feedback and encouraging me over the course of this work.

I would also like to extend my thanks to Dr Shreekant Deodhar, who helped me in the earlier explorations of the data sets on R and formulating my thoughts for these visualisations.