The Curse of Knowledge? Education, Corruption, and Politics

Abstract

Education has consistently been found to be positively related to political participation, electoral turnout, civic engagement, political knowledge, and democratic attitudes and opinions. Previous research has, however, not sufficiently acknowledged the large existing between-and within-country variations in institutional quality when studying this relationship. This study asks the question: how do highly educated, well-informed, and critical citizens react to a political system with low-quality institutions; a system with high levels of corruption? Researchers have in recent years started to acknowledge corruption as a relevant factor in explaining democratic attitudes and behavior. However, how corruption interacts with individual characteristics in shaping political behavior is largely unexplored in the literature. This paper focuses on the interaction between corruption and education with regard to different political attitudes and democratic behavior. Using both individual-and country-level data from 31 democracies the results show that corruption thwarts many of the positive effects of education with regard to politics: The results indicate that when corruption is high, educated and politically sophisticated citizens are as likely as low-educated citizens to feel resignation with regard to formal political institutions. This, in turn, is likely to affect patterns of political participation among these citizens.

Voting Women, Protesting Men: A Multilevel Analysis of Corruption, Gender, and Political Participation

“…We here examine a potential piece in this puzzle by examining how the links between corruption perceptions and political participation differ for men and women. Previous studies show that the effect of perceptions of corruption differ across social groups (Agerberg 2019;Bazurli and Portos 2019), but the differences between men and women remain unclear. It has been a cause for concern that previous research has found a consistent gender gap in political participation (Dalton 2017;Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995).…”

The Lesser Evil? Corruption Voting and the Importance of Clean Alternatives

“…Transparency International estimates that over 80 % of the world's population live in countries where corruption is a very serious problem. 2 Research shows that startlingly poor public institutions can be 1 INTRODUCTION found, for instance, at the heart of western Europe, in what many consider among the most 'developed' parts of the world (Charron et al 2013). A growing literature in political science has, in the light of this, started to ask questions about how differences in institutional quality shape and structure citizens' political attitudes and behavior.…”

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

“…Providing further evidence for an interaction between democratic quality and education, Ugur-Cinar et al (2020) show that education and political trust are positively correlated in countries with low levels of corruption but that in highly corrupt countries, the more highly educated express less trust in political institutions than the less educated. Similarly, Agerberg (2019) finds education to have a weaker positive effect on what he calls "institutional attitudes" in democracies with high levels of corruption, indicating that corruption has a stronger negative effect on citizens' attitudes among the higher educated. Overall, we can therefore expect the indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust to be larger for more highly educated citizens.…”