Education, Complaints, and Accountability

Better-educated countries have better governments, an empirical regularity thatholds in both dictatorships and democracies. Possible reasons for this fact arethat educated people are more likely to complain about misconduct by governmentofficials and that more frequent complaints encourage better behaviorfrom officials. Newly assembled individual-level survey data from the WorldJustice Project show that, within countries, better-educated people are morelikely to report official misconduct. The results are confirmed using other surveydata on reporting crime and corruption. Citizens’ complaints might thus be anoperative mechanism that explains the link between education and the qualityof government.