The impact of experience on how we perceive the rule of law

Abstract

Experience is a major source of knowledge. Could institutions be improved by eliciting the additional knowledge held by experienced individuals? I show here that in several areas of the law experienced individuals are more critical of institutional quality than inexperienced individuals. Moreover, performance indexes built with experienced subsamples substantially alter country rankings. Assuming no unmeasured confounders, more knowledge arguably leads experienced individuals to revise the more benign view held by the general population, composed mostly of inexperienced individuals. Moreover, experience is a stronger driver than alternative sources of knowledge, including education, which might therefore be reinforcing milder and, arguably, incorrect assessments of institutional quality. After observing how this “experience effect” varies systematically across countries, I conclude by proposing that evaluations of institutional quality pay greater attention to experienced individuals and cautioning against basing inferences on assessments made by the general population.

This work has greatly benefitted from valuable comments and exchanges with Albert Satorra, as well as Lee J. Alston, Mircea Epure, Marco Fabbri, Dean Lueck, Ethan Michelson, Dan Rockmore, Pablo T. Spiller, Gustavo F. Torrens, John Wallis, three anonymous referees and participants at the World Justice Project’s Scholars Conference at Duke University, the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, the Quality of Governance Institute at the University of Gothenburg, the Stockholm 23rd Conference of SIOE and the University of Vigo. I am grateful to Juan Botero, Alejandro Ponce, and the WJP for providing me with data. The project received support from the Spanish Government through grant ECO2017-85763-R and the Severo Ochoa Program for Centers of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2015-0563). Usual disclaimers apply.