  In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of political power on the
provision of public education. We use data from a historical nondemocratic
society with a weighted voting system where eligible voters received votes in
proportion to their taxable income and without any limit on the maximum of
votes, i.e., the political system used in Swedish local governments during the
period 1862-1909. We use a novel identification strategy where we combine two
different identification strategies, i.e., a threshold regression analysis and
a generalized event-study design, both of which exploit nonlinearities or
discontinuities in the effect of political power between two opposing local
elites: agricultural landowners and emerging industrialists. The results
suggest that school spending is approximately 90-120% higher if the nonagrarian
interest controls all of the votes compared to when landowners have more than a
majority of votes. Moreover, we find no evidence that the concentration of
landownership affected this relationship
