Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Law
Education, Complaints, And Accountability, Juan Botero, Alejandro Ponce, Andrei Shleifer
Education, Complaints, And Accountability, Juan Botero, Alejandro Ponce, Andrei Shleifer
Alejandro Ponce
Better educated countries have better governments, an empirical regularity that holds in both dictatorships and democracies. A possible reason for this fact is 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. Citizen complaints might thus be an operative mechanism that explains the link between education and the quality …