| Summary: | This paper aims to measure the relationship between systemic vulnerability and government development investments. Systemic vulnerability is a concept introduced by Doner et al. (2005), which suggests that broad coalitions, severe external threats and scarce resources will lead to developmental states. Developmental states have several definitions that can generally be divided into structural and ideological features. Structural features include aspects related to state capacity and bureaucratic robustness, while ideological features refer to a stated goal of development. However, the term “developmental state” is also used as a political buzzword, which has diluted the academic concept. Education investments are used as a proxy for development investments because of the long-term societal and economic benefits that education has in a society. The study combines theories of political behavior, state-building and rentier states for the argument that systemic vulnerability should be positively correlated with education investments. Analysis is based on data from 73 countries and it shows that only some components of systemic vulnerability are correlated with education investments. The weak relationship between scarce resources and education investment follows the expected trend, while the relationship between external threat and education investment is unexpectedly negative. The broad coalitions show no statistically significant correlation between coalition size and education investment. These findings make a contribution to the field of development studies by expanding the understanding of the impact that systemic vulnerability has on development, since there has not been a large-n test of the concept on development investments before.
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