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[Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 56 (November 2013)]
䉷 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-2186/2013/5604-0028$10.00
Education, Complaints, and Accountability
Juan Botero World Justice Project
Alejandro Ponce World Justice Project
Andrei Shleifer Harvard University
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 gov-
ernment 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.
1. Introduction
By just about any measure, the quality of government is higher in richer and
more educated countries. Such countries tend to be more democratic, politically
freer, more respectful of property rights, less corrupt, and more efficient in the
provision of public services such as infrastructure and regulation (see, for ex-
ample, La Porta et al. 1999; Barro 1999; Treisman 2000; Svensson 2005). Figures
1–4 illustrate some well-known correlations between education and the quality
of government. The positive correlation between education (or per capita in-
A previous version of this paper circulated under the title “Education and the Quality of Gov-
ernment.” We are grateful to Ernesto Dal Bo´, Larry Katz, Sendhil Mullainathan, Emily Oster, Benjamin
Schoefer, Josh Schwartzstein, Jesse Shapiro, Daniel Treisman, the referees, and the editor for helpful
comments. We thank Transparency International for sharing the Global Corruption Barometer 2009
data. Botero and Ponce thank the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation for their support of the World Justice Project. Shleifer thanks the Kauffman Foundation
for the support of his research. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do
not necessarily represent the views of the World Justice Project, its board of directors, or its honorary
chairs.
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Figure 1. The quality of government and education: Transparency International’s Corruption
Perceptions Index.
Figure 2. The quality of government and education: World Bank’s Worldwide Governance
Indicators.
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Figure 3. The quality of government and education: Heritage Foundation’s Economic Free-
dom Index.
Figure 4. The quality of government and education: World Justice Project’s Rule of Law
Index.
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come) and the quality of government holds in both dictatorships and democracies
(Figures 5–8). It also holds in countries with different legal traditions, ethnic
heterogeneity, and inequality (La Porta et al. 1999). Most studies find that ed-
ucation and development lead to improved government (for example, see Barro
1999; Glaeser et al. 2004; Bobba and Coviello 2007; Castello-Climent 2008;
Murtin and Wacziarg 2011), although some disagree (Acemoglu et al. 2005). In
this paper, we ask why the quality of government improves with education and
development, assuming that it does.
The most common explanation for the improvement in the quality of gov-
ernment in the process of development is accountability. Perhaps the central
mechanism of such accountability, going back at least to Hirschman’s (1970)
idea of voice, is voting. If voters punish incompetent or corrupt politicians, and
if education promotes political participation and voting, then increases in ed-
ucation lead to improvements in the quality of government. Verba and Nie (1972)
and Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995) are among the first prominent studies
in political science that link education t o political participation. These studies
consider both voting and other forms of participation, such as volunteering. Dee
(2004) and Milligan, Moretti, and Oreopoulus (2004) provide evidence of causal
links between education and voting.
Voting is surely impor tant, but the fact that the quality of government improves
with education in dictatorships as well as in democracies is an indication that
voting is not the only mechanism linking the two. In fact, recent research has
broadened the notions of political accountability and focused on the roles of
audits, the media, disclosure by politicians, political checks and balances, and
even uprisings in monitoring government misconduct. Some of the growing
number of studies in this area include Reinikka and Svensson (2004, 2005),
Glaeser, Ponzetto, and Shleifer (2007), Olken (2007), Pandey et al. (2007), Ferraz
and Finan (2008, 2011), Djankov et al. (2010), Pande (2011), and Ferraz, Finan,
and Moreira (2012).
In this paper, we propose a complementary mechanism of accountability. In
our view, one reason why government improves is that citizens complain about
public officials who mistreat them: policemen who beat them up, officials who
demand bribes, teachers who do not show up. All countries have some laws
against police abuse, corruption, and public employee absenteeism, which include
penalties for official misconduct. A public official choosing to break rules must
trade off the risk of being disciplined, no matter how small for each individual
complaint, against the benefits of misconduct. As citizens’ complaints proliferate,
the risk of an investigation and disciplinary action rises. We propose that educated
people are more likely to complain about official misconduct (and perhaps to
complain more effectively). As education levels in a country rise, so does the
number of complaints when officials misbehave, which raises the expected costs
of misconduct and thus encourages better behavior—asking for fewer bribes,
avoiding abusing people, showing up to work. Through this entirely decentralized
process, only roughly dependent on the prevailing political arrangements such
Figure 5. The quality of government and education in autocratic regimes: Transparency
International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
Figure 6. The quality of government and education in autocratic regimes: World Bank’s
Worldwide Governance Indicators.
