Abstract:
Better-educated countries have better governments, an empirical regularity that
holds in both dictatorships and democracies. Possible reasons for this fact are
that educated people are more likely to complain about misconduct by government
officials and that more frequent complaints encourage better behavior
from officials. Newly assembled individual-level survey data from the World
Justice Project show that, within countries, better-educated people are more
likely to report official misconduct. The results are confirmed using other survey
data on reporting crime and corruption. Citizens’ complaints might thus be an
operative mechanism that explains the link between education and the quality
of government.