How can political trust be built after civil wars? Evidence from post-conflict Sierra Leone

Abstract

As a fundamental concept in peace research, trust, or the lack of it, has shown to be associated with the onset of violent conflict, the instability of negotiated settlement, and the sustainability of peace. Despite its proven importance, the question of how political trust can be built after civil conflicts has only received limited attention and remains unanswered. While previous studies demonstrated that improved provision of public services plays a significant role in a trust-building process, the present article shows a more nuanced picture, namely that service enhancement only works if it reflects the needs of people. Projects that do not properly mirror the needs of people, however, have no direct effect on building political trust. Using micro-level data from Sierra Leone, the article finds that people are more likely to trust governments that are willing to listen and respond to their needs and demands. Though government performance carries the previously hypothesized effect, its explanatory power reduces substantively once responsiveness is introduced into the analysis. This finding also holds when potential biases due to endogeneity and sample selection are considered. Results from a mediation analysis also indicate that if government performance has any effect, it is transmitted through the responsiveness mechanism. Overall, this article contributes to the literature by clarifying the mechanism of trust-building in post-conflict societies.

Implementing REDD+ in a Conflict-Affected Country: A Case Study of the Democratic Republic of Congo

“…Based on research in post-conflict Sierra Leone, it is suggested that being responsive to the needs of people is the key to successful trust building. National governments must demonstrate real concern for the needs of local people and engage them in policy making in order to enhance political trust [54]. Good governance, locally, as defined as a decrease in political corruption, and increased trust in politicians and political performance, is associated with a lower probability of conflict-related violence at the subnational level [55].…”

‘What they say peters down’: How non-profit leaders assess the trustworthiness of government – Elite discourse and distrust in post-conflict Northern Ireland

“…Thus, rather than becoming embroiled in a debate about whether trust in government is culturally or institutionally based (e.g. see Mishler and Rose, 2001; Wong, 2016), we allowed our research participants to make connections, in line with our exploratory approach.…”

“…As Wong (2016) notes, ‘Trust development is an evolutionary process that involves constant evaluation and learning about the behaviours of the trustees’ (p. 2). Through public communication and public relations activities, citizens are able to make such judgements about political actors, and this in turn affects how they engage with the democratic process (Brunner and Smallwood, 2019; Hargie and Irving, 2017).…”

“…Citizens living in deeply divided or conflict-affected societies may naturally have different expectations to the norm of government trustworthiness (e.g. transparency, competence), such as to rebuild societal divides and work for the ‘common good’ (Taylor, 2000; Wong, 2016), or indeed to represent group interests (Avraham, 2003).…”

Violence, Empathy, and Altruism: Evidence from the Ivoiran Refugee Crisis in Liberia

“…In considering these questions, we engage with a small but growing body of research on the social legacies of violence in regions recovering from conflict (e.g. Kijewski and Freitag (2016); Mironova and Whitt (2016); Wong (2016)). This literature o↵ers two competing perspectives.…”