The Impact of Experience on How we Perceive the Rule of Law

Benito Arruñada
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Benito Arruñada

No 1139, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

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.

Keywords: institutions; experience; knowledge; perception; rule of law; measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D71 D83 K12 K14 K31 K32 K41 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1139-file.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of experience on how we perceive the rule of law (2020)
Working Paper: The impact of experience on how we perceive the rule of law (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:1139

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().