Do democratic electoral systems strengthen a country's outcomes in education? Does the degree of inclusiveness of a democratic system matter? This article offers evidence that political competition and the inclusion of marginalized populations in electoral systems transformed education over an 80‐year period in Latin America. It finds that democracy has a positive effect on education enrollment and illustrates how current work on democracy and development has overlooked important democratic subcomponents, specifically, who votes and how. Our results deepen current work on democracy, operationalizing the impact of electoral expansion in comparative analysis and showing how democracies respond to specific education demands.