There has in recent years been a growing interest in the citizens' lack of confidence in public authorities. This has been driven by specific events in single countries such as cases of police brutality in the United States and by cross-cutting developments in many countries such as rising inequality. The interest has further been amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic where public authorities have been responsible for enforcing containment and closure policies vis-à-vis the citizens. Although there are a number of both macro and micro-level studies of attitude formation towards public authorities, there is a lack of knowledge about how the two levels interact. Studies suggest that education is a key factor in public opinion formation (Bovens and Wille 2017; Steen 1996; Kuhn et al. 2016; Hakhverdian and Mayne 2015). However, the direction between education and confidence is not clear. On the one hand, citizens with longer educations are more informed and then, likely to be more critical towards dysfunctional public authorities. On the other hand, people with higher education have more competencies in understanding and interacting with public authorities which might be translated into higher confidence. The article makes use of data spanning 162664 individuals across 34 countries in the period 1994-2020 for a multi-level model which enables us to examine how the level of education interacts with important macro-level drivers in terms of the procedural and distributional fairness as well as the output, and process performance of the public authorities.