International political context and institutional authority over the curriculum: Cross-national trends in curricular centralization, 1960–2020

How are decisions about the school curriculum delegated in national education systems? Curricular centralization can shape how students are socialized in school and how educational outcomes are distributed in a country; however, existing research on the topic has been constrained by a lack of systematic longitudinal data for a global set of countries. We draw on newly available data for 130 countries from 1960 to 2020 to explore the country-level factors that shape curricular centralization. Our argument emphasizes the role of political and historical context at the international level in shaping curricular centralization at the national level. Over the postwar period, diffusing norms of national sovereignty, global waves of democratization, and the unexpected fall of the Soviet Union defined the kinds of curricular policies that had political legitimacy. We find that countries that gained independence between 1945 and 1990 are more likely to have more centralized curricula, while more democratic countries and post-Soviet countries are more likely to have less centralized forms of authority over the curriculum. The institutional logic that links these national-level characteristics and a country’s level of curricular centralization is culturally constructed by this evolving international context, rather than a historical inevitability.