Education, democratic governance, and satisfaction with democracy: Multilevel evidence from Latin America

Abstract

It is usually recognized that satisfaction with democracy is enhanced by clean governments and fair democratic procedures. However, under certain circumstances, some citizens might appreciate the quality of democratic governance more than others. Building on research that underlines the accuracy and norm-inducing functions of education, we argue that the quality of democratic governance conditions the relationship between education and satisfaction with democracy. Analyzing data from 18 Latin American countries, we find that higher-educated citizens are less satisfied with the regime than the less-educated. Among the highly educated, nonetheless, the least satisfied are those who were asked by public officials to pay bribes. Highly educated individuals are more satisfied with the regime if their country’s quality of democracy is robust rather than weak. At the lowest level of education, the conditional influence of being asked for a bribe or the quality of democracy is absent.

Quality of Democracy Makes a Difference, but Not for Everyone: How Political Interest, Education, and Conceptions of Democracy Condition the Relationship Between Democratic Quality and Political Trust

“…In addition, a number of researchers have pointed to the role of education, suggesting that apart from its accuracy-inducing function (see above, hypothesis 3), education also has a norm-inducing function. According to this view, higher education elicits stronger support for core democratic values and principles (Evans and Rose, 2007;Kotzian, 2011;Kołczyńska, 2020), which then leads to citizens attaching higher priority to democratic quality when evaluating their political system (Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012;van der Meer and Hakhverdian, 2017;Monsiváis-Carrillo and Cantú Ramos, 2020). Empirically, while previous studies confirm a moderating effect of education on how democratic quality relates to political trust (see above), evidence for an interaction between democratic quality and citizens' value orientations is scarce and at best mixed.…”

“…Ceteris paribus, we can expect those with higher education to be more likely to be able both to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources of information and to understand their content correctly. Consequently, the higher educated not only have higher political knowledge but also hold more accurate beliefs about the political system (Seligson, 2002;Monsiváis-Carrillo and Cantú Ramos, 2020). Lending empirical support to the idea that the well-educated are better informed about their country's democratic quality, Ananda and Bol (2020) show that providing information about democracy to citizens in Indonesia lowers satisfaction with democracy among the lower educated but not among the higher educated.…”