Does Education Matter for Leadership?

In ordinary life, we think of education as useful: If we're well-educated, we make better decisions, both professionally and personally. Is the same true on a national scale? That's the question asked by the economists Timothy Besley, Jose Montalvo, and Marta Reynal-Querol in a paper called "Do Educated Leaders Matter?" Their conclusion: educated leaders tend to preside over more economic growth.

Woodrow Wilson is the only president to have held a Ph.D (in history and political science, from Johns Hopkins).

It's harder than you might think to isolate education as a variable in politics. But the researchers have hit upon a novel way to do it: they focus on "random leadership transitions," moments when leaders are removed from office "due to natural death, accident or serious illness." By comparing the rate of growth before a leader's random, unexpected demise to the rate of growth afterwards, they can get a rough picture of how much that leader mattered. In effect, they're looking to see what happens when a leader is suddenly swapped out and replaced by a new one; they then cross-reference that data with information about educational attainment. Their database goes back to 1875, and includes 185 sudden deaths from all over the world.

There's quite a lot of number-crunching involved, but they do find a correlation. "On average," they write, "the departure of an educated leader" -- a leader with a postgraduate education, like a Ph.D or law degree -- "leads to a 0.713 percentage point reduction in growth. This contrasts with the reduction of just 0.05 percentage points after the death of a leader who does not have a post-graduate qualification." It appears that the more educated leaders were doing something right before they were suddenly removed from office -- and that replacing them with less-educated leaders resulted, on some level, in less effective policy. There's a reverse effect as well: when comparatively less-educated leaders die, their replacements are statistically likely to be more educated, and so growth tends to increase after those transitions.

Besley, Montalvo, and Reynal-Querol admit that "the exact mechanisms at work in explaining how leadership matters remain opaque"; it's not at all clear how being educated matters. Maybe better-educated leaders are better at making decisions; maybe they surround themselves with better advisors. The main point is that education is, to some extent, a useful heuristic for thinking about leadership quality. It's possible, of course, to put too much faith in the idea of "the best and the brightest" -- but it's a mistake to think that education doesn't help you lead.