This is an important and ambitious book. It proposes an original and innovative framework for understanding the conditions under which governments choose to expand mass education and applies it to three countries: Ghana, Brazil, and Taiwan. Each offers interesting variations in terms of type of political regime, degree of inequality, level of economic development, culture, and colonial heritage. In fact, the three countries have few things in common and the author's research design follows Stuart Mill's method of agreement: if the phenomenon occurs across settings that have only one factor in common, this one factor is the cause. In the author's framework, this phenomenon is the political entrepreneurship of the poor—the mobilization of poor voters.

The book offers empirical analyses of education policy spanning five decades in the three countries. It draws on mostly qualitative and some quantitative evidence collected from primary and secondary sources. As an empirical contribution, the book is a tour de force: the scope of the material covered is extensive, and it involved field research in three continents. Future researchers of educational policy will greatly benefit from the detailed description of the evolution of educational policymaking in the countries since the 1940s, which the author provides in the book's three empirical chapters.

As the title of the book suggests, the gist of its argument is that the political entrepreneurship of the poor, not democracy as a political regime, explains why governments invest in mass education. Two factors drive governments to expand education: the political mobilization of the poor and the flexibility of the labor market faced by employers who need skilled workers. The former determines whether the government will depend politically on elites, cross-class alliances, or the poorer groups, which will ultimately shape key features of the educational system, including the priority given to primary and higher education. In turn, the flexibility of the labor market defines the nature and extent of any worker-training program the government will seek to provide.

Kosack uses the political entrepreneurship of the poor as an identification strategy. The success of political entrepreneurs helps to determine what he calls the “vital constituency,” the key group supporting government and which the latter will serve. The more analytically interesting questions about the conditions leading to the emergence and success of political entrepreneurs are not explored in the book. Absent political competition, the “vital constituency” is the elites. The strength of the poor is numbers—but they remain a latent group until a political entrepreneur organizes and mobilizes them. This sounds familiar, but the integrated discussion of political entrepreneurship and redistributive politics is new. The strength of the book is this integration and its application to the cases.

Kosack finds fault with current accounts in which democracy and democratization are viewed as the main cause of mass education and finds that regime change did not affect the incentives for expanding mass education in any of the countries he studies. Mass education preceded democratization: Ghana significantly expanded mass education in two waves: under Nkrumah (1951–1966) and under Rawlings (1966–1981), both autocratic rulers. In turn, in Taiwan, the Kuomintang revolutionized the educational system by extending mass education to peasants after it came to power in 1947. Under Vargas's authoritarian government (1930–1945), Brazil built an all-levels system that catered to the urban poor. The case of Brazil is the least compelling of the cases discussed. Educational reforms under democratic rule 1989–2000 are very consistent with a median voter model: higher education received little priority and both enrollment and quality monitoring improved significantly. Elite split causes this says the author, but one could argue this is political competition under democracy. While the authoritarian regime—social policy causal link has been advanced before in the large and established literature on the emergence of social insurance in advanced capitalist countries, the author advances a compelling explanation that regimes are a poor predictor of mass education. More references to this debate and to historical accounts of education in these countries would have strengthened the author's case. The author also criticizes the argument that the “imperatives of the economy” are the driving force in the expansion of education. The Taiwanese miracle would prima facie provide evidence that market forces (or as some have put it, enlightened technocrats) engender demands for mass education. Rather, the author claims the Asian Tiger “was demonstrably driven by politics, not economics,” in making its education policy. The economic consequences of the system were an accident of its “vital constituency,” the peasantry on whose support it depended for its nationalist drive against former Japanese colonial powers and Mainland China.

The Education of Nations is a carefully researched book and a major contribution to the scholarship on the political economy of educational policymaking.