Why Quality Matters: Rebuilding Trustworthy Local Government in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

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

“…Estimation results further reveal that the relationship between attitude change and active listening is symmetric: people would mistrust local politicians who did not listen to their needs. Sacks & Larizza (2012) found that the quality of government services is a major contributing factor to political trust. Though my results do not provide any empirical support for the effects of public services, the non-finding may be explained by the use of different indicators.…”

“…Sacks & Larizza, 2012). Whether or not this relationship works through the channels they describe remains unclear and unproved.…”

The Hearts and Minds in Conflict and Peace

“…Cassar, Grosjean, and Whitt (2013), Cuesta and Alda (2012), Luca and Verpoorten (2015), and Rohner, Thoenig, and Zilibotti (2013), yet there is only a handful of studies devoted to the topic of trust in government. These studies found that satisfaction with government services is a strong predictor of trust in government (Askvik, Jamil, and Dhakal, 2011;Hutchison and Johnson, 2011;Sacks and Larizza, 2012;Stoyan et al, 2016), a finding consistent with studies in developed countries.…”

“…Sacks and Larizza (2012). Whether or not this relationship works through the channels they describe remains unclear and unproven.…”

“…Second, most of the previous research has only relied on basic estimation methods such as OLS and multilevel analysis, which are incapable of addressing the empirical challenges of endogeneity and selection bias (e.g. see Askvik, Jamil, andDhakal (2011), Juan andPierskalla (2016), Hutchison and Johnson (2011), Sacks and Larizza (2012), and Stoyan et al (2016). This article engages these challenges by applying the instrumental variable method and Heckman's selection model to deal with the potential endogeneity bias and the data attrition problem commonly encountered in studies using survey data.…”