placestats

Education score vs. Trust in government

Holds up after adjusting for income

Across 47 countries, Education score and Trust in government rise and fall together at r = -0.08 (on a scale from −1 to +1, where 0 means no link). There is almost no link to explain.

Comparing countries across the middle half of trust in government, 34% to 50.8% of respondents, education score is worse by 0.0185 typical gaps at the top of that range than the bottom. Comparing only countries with similar national income, the gap is 0.0559 typical gaps.

Link before adjusting (r)-0.083p = 0.578 · 47 countries
After adjusting for national income-0.285p = 0.055 · likely range [-0.53, +0.01]
p, allowing for regions0.004standard error 0.056 · 6 regions
Check for luck (q)0.046across 12,497 pairs

How to read these.r runs from −1 (one goes up as the other goes down) to +1 (they rise together), and 0 means no link. Adjusting for national income means comparing countries with the same GDP per person, so differences in wealth can’t explain the link. Income is used in percentage terms, since an extra $1,000 means more to a poor country than to a rich one. p is how likely a link this strong would be if there were really none. Below 0.05 means it is unlikely to be chance. Very small values are written in short form: 1.1e-32 means a decimal point followed by 31 zeros and then 11, so very close to zero. The likely range is where the true figure probably lies, and a range that crosses zero means the link could easily be chance. Countries in the same region tend to resemble each other, so the third figure allows for that, which gives a fairer p. The standard error is the typical size of the error in r. Finally, testing this many pairs means some will look strong by luck alone. A q below 0.05 means this link is unlikely to be one of those.

Education score · typical gaps (standard deviations)link with income +0.81 · proxy
Trust in government · % of respondentslink with income +0.36 · moderate

“Link with income” is how closely each measure tracks GDP per person across countries, from −1 to +1.

Every country as a dot

Education score · typical gaps (standard deviations) →Trust in government · % of respondents →0.5841.4410.5%83.5%Argentina: 1.03 typical gaps (standard deviations), 33.5% of respondentsAustralia: 1.03 typical gaps (standard deviations), 49% of respondentsAustria: 1 typical gaps (standard deviations), 46% of respondentsBelgium: 1.25 typical gaps (standard deviations), 50.5% of respondentsBulgaria: 0.794 typical gaps (standard deviations), 10.5% of respondentsBrazil: 0.731 typical gaps (standard deviations), 45% of respondentsCanada: 1.06 typical gaps (standard deviations), 47.5% of respondentsSwitzerland: 0.92 typical gaps (standard deviations), 82.5% of respondentsChile: 0.979 typical gaps (standard deviations), 34.5% of respondentsColombia: 0.63 typical gaps (standard deviations), 29.5% of respondentsCosta Rica: 0.629 typical gaps (standard deviations), 49.5% of respondentsCzechia: 1.08 typical gaps (standard deviations), 37% of respondentsGermany: 0.938 typical gaps (standard deviations), 52% of respondentsDenmark: 0.941 typical gaps (standard deviations), 54.5% of respondentsSpain: 0.983 typical gaps (standard deviations), 40.5% of respondentsEstonia: 0.841 typical gaps (standard deviations), 46% of respondentsFinland: 1.02 typical gaps (standard deviations), 70.5% of respondentsFrance: 0.907 typical gaps (standard deviations), 41.5% of respondentsUnited Kingdom: 1.19 typical gaps (standard deviations), 34.5% of respondentsGreece: 1.31 typical gaps (standard deviations), 29.5% of respondentsCroatia: 0.985 typical gaps (standard deviations), 46.5% of respondentsHungary: 0.83 typical gaps (standard deviations), 33.5% of respondentsIndonesia: 0.591 typical gaps (standard deviations), 83.5% of respondentsIreland: 1.18 typical gaps (standard deviations), 61% of respondentsIceland: 1.26 typical gaps (standard deviations), 42.5% of respondentsIsrael: 0.804 typical gaps (standard deviations), 42% of respondentsItaly: 0.94 typical gaps (standard deviations), 40% of respondentsJapan: 1.04 typical gaps (standard deviations), 33% of respondentsKorea, Rep.: 1.03 typical gaps (standard deviations), 29.5% of respondentsLithuania: 0.928 typical gaps (standard deviations), 42.5% of respondentsLuxembourg: 0.66 typical gaps (standard deviations), 82% of respondentsLatvia: 0.923 typical gaps (standard deviations), 31% of respondentsMexico: 0.636 typical gaps (standard deviations), 59.5% of respondentsNetherlands: 1.27 typical gaps (standard deviations), 51% of respondentsNorway: 1 typical gaps (standard deviations), 58% of respondentsNew Zealand: 1.44 typical gaps (standard deviations), 50.5% of respondentsPeru: 0.773 typical gaps (standard deviations), 13.5% of respondentsPoland: 0.952 typical gaps (standard deviations), 43% of respondentsPortugal: 1.02 typical gaps (standard deviations), 43% of respondentsRomania: 0.584 typical gaps (standard deviations), 25.5% of respondentsSlovak Republic: 0.801 typical gaps (standard deviations), 32% of respondentsSlovenia: 1.18 typical gaps (standard deviations), 41% of respondentsSweden: 0.968 typical gaps (standard deviations), 52% of respondentsThailand: 0.764 typical gaps (standard deviations), 55% of respondentsTurkiye: 1.03 typical gaps (standard deviations), 40% of respondentsUnited States: 1.11 typical gaps (standard deviations), 28% of respondentsSouth Africa: 0.665 typical gaps (standard deviations), 47.5% of respondentsBGRCHEGRCIDNIRLLUXNZLPERROUUSA

best-fit line line after adjusting

Four ways to measure the link

MethodrpCountries
Standard (Pearson), not adjusted-0.0830.57847
By rank (Spearman), not adjusted-0.0450.76547
Standard (Pearson), adjusted for national income-0.2850.05547
By rank (Spearman), adjusted for national income-0.2930.04847

The rank version uses only each country’s place in line, from lowest to highest, so a few extreme countries count for less. The adjusted and unadjusted versions use the same 47 countries: those that report both measures and GDP per person. So the gap between them comes from the adjustment, not from a change in which countries are counted. Drop in the size of r after adjusting: -0.202 (a minus sign means it grew).

How solid is it?

Leaving out one country at a time, r ranges from -0.363 (without ROU) to -0.169 (without LUX). The bar above shows that range on a scale from −1 to +1, with the solid line at the full result. The single country that moves r most: LUX (+0.115).

Fragile: this link may not hold up.
  • leave-one-out range spans 0.19 in r
  • correlation moves sharply once outliers are trimmed
  • much weaker within regions than across them (largely a between-region difference)

Within each region

Countries are not separate, unrelated cases, and neighbors share a lot. A link that holds inside each region is far more believable than one that shows up only when comparing regions.

nr
Europe & Central Asia30-0.12

By income third

If the link shows up only in the richest third of countries, it is a feature of rich countries, not a general pattern.

nr
Poorest third16-0.15
Middle third15+0.27
Richest third16-0.47

By largest religious group

Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.

nr
Christians38-0.33

Without outliers (countries far outside the middle half of countries on either measure, by more than one and a half times the width of that middle half): r = -0.129 after dropping 4 countries.

Two series, one country

Both measures over the years for one country you pick. The two charts are stacked so they share only the years along the bottom.

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Over time, within countries

Everything above compares countries with each other at one moment. This section compares each country only with itself over 0years. So a link here can’t come from anything about a country that stays the same, such as its history, geography, institutions or culture.

Not enough history inside each country to look at this over time. That needs countries measured for several years in a row, and at least one of these measures is measured too rarely.

The data


typical gaps (standard deviations)
% of respondents		Years
New Zealand NZL1.4450.5%2023, 2024
Greece GRC1.3129.5%2023, 2024
Netherlands NLD1.2751%2023, 2024
Iceland ISL1.2642.5%2023, 2024
Belgium BEL1.2550.5%2023, 2024
United Kingdom GBR1.1934.5%2023, 2024
Ireland IRL1.1861%2022, 2024
Slovenia SVN1.1841%2023, 2024
United States USA1.1128%2022, 2024
Czechia CZE1.0837%2023, 2024
Canada CAN1.0647.5%2023, 2024
Japan JPN1.0433%2023, 2024
Argentina ARG1.0333.5%2023, 2024
Australia AUS1.0349%2024
Korea, Rep. KOR1.0329.5%2024

uis; undp_hdr; wdi
OECD databases as named on each indicator: PISA, Social Expenditure Database (SOCX), Income Distribution Database, Development Assistance Committee statistics, Family Database, Government at a Glance, Corporate Tax Statistics, employment and environment statistics

Sources

Education score

Education score

PlaceStats · via PlaceStats · Derived work; each member keeps its own licence · updated recomputed with the panel

The average of 10 measures from 3 publishers. Each measure is first put on a common scale: 0 is the average country in an average year, and 1 is a typical gap between countries (a standard deviation). Each is turned so that higher is better. Measures are averaged within each publisher first, so a publisher with many measures does not count for more. Members: Primary completion, Expected schooling, Mean years of schooling, Adult literacy, Pupil-teacher ratio, Primary enrollment, Out of school, primary, Secondary enrollment, Tertiary enrollment, Researchers.

Trust in government

Share with confidence in the national government

Gallup World Poll, compiled in OECD How's Life? · via Our World in Data · CC BY 4.0 (OECD terms and conditions) · updated annual, except the snapshots noted per indicator

Gallup asks whether people have confidence in their national government. The OECD pools three years of answers at a time, so the figures are for 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2024, not every year. The same survey supplies the Cantril ladder, but from a different question. The two are not built from each other, so their pair is a real finding, not shared numbers. It is, though, a finding about one survey.

How this was computed

Data used: most recent value in 2010-2025; values come from 2022–2025. To adjust for income, each measure is first predicted from GDP per person (in percentage terms, on a log scale) with a straight-line fit. Only what is left over is then compared. This is called a partial correlation. The line is drawn the standard way (ordinary least squares), which picks the line that comes closest to all the countries at once. The error margins allow for countries in the same region resembling each other, using 6 World Bank regions. The q-value corrects for testing all 12,497 pairs at once, using the Benjamini–Hochberg method. Underlying data last updated DYB 2024. How the country data works · explore Education score and Trust in government

This page shows that two measures go together. It does not show that Education score changes Trust in government, or the reverse. These figures also describe countries, not individual people. See the ecological fallacy.

More links with Education score or Trust in government