The Antecedents of Approval, Trust and Legitimating Beliefs in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and six Arab Countries
Audrey Sacks[1]
World Bank Institute Governance Practice
9/19/2011
Contents
Executive Summary
Approval and Trust in Government and Legitimating Beliefs
Government Effectiveness
Government Performance in Service Delivery
Bureaucratic Competence and Honesty
Procedural Justice
Data, Methods and Measures
Data
Methods
Measures
Dependent Variables
Independent Variables
Government Service Delivery Activities
Administrative Competence and Honesty
Procedural Justice
Results
Approval of the Incumbent Government’s Performance
Government service delivery
Administrative Competence and Honesty
Procedural Justice
Trust in Government
Government service delivery
Administrative Competence and Honesty
Procedural Justice
Willingness to Defer to the Government
Government service delivery
Administrative Competence and Honesty
Procedural Justice
Conclusion
References
Appendix A: Figures
Executive Summary
Under what conditions are governments likely to implement public sector management (PSM) reforms? Only governments which are able to demonstrate its effectiveness to citizens and elicit their approval in the short-term and their trust and legitimacy in the longer-term will have the necessary leverage to implement PSM reforms. For those concerned with improving the quality of government, we are interested in examining how individuals come to develop and accept current standards for normative appropriateness and how they are able to assess the extent to which a government meets those standards. Governments and politicians seeking trust or legitimation try to win, or even buy, approval, but they do not always succeed in winning popular endorsement or anything approaching legitimacy. Social scientists are still grappling with how to objectively assess the extent to which a government is effective, let alone demonstrate that citizens perceive it as such or translate that perception into approval, trust and legitimating beliefs. I investigate the extent to which approval of the incumbent government, trust in government and legitimating beliefs derive from government’s performance in delivering services, maintaining a competent and honest bureaucracy and adhering to procedurally just criteria.
Where such a relationship exists, I posit that there is the potential for the development of a virtuous circle. A government that shows early returns from PSM reforms in terms of improving service delivery, procedural justice and the quality of its bureaucracy will have the necessary political capital to undertake more far-reaching and politically costly PSM reforms at a later stage. Further, these improvements are likely to increase citizens’ trust in governmental authority and their quasi-voluntary compliance with government taxation, which will improve a government’s capacity to become more effective and to evoke deference, which will further enhance the credibility of future reform packages.
I test these arguments using survey data from Africa, Latin America and six Arab countries. This paper provides empirical support across three continents for a long hypothesized link between an effective and fair government and citizens’ approval of and trust in the state and their willingness to defer to governmental authority. Across Africa, Latin America and a sample of Arab countries, citizens who view public officials as fair, honest and competent are considerably more likely to approve of the incumbent government’s performance and are more likely to trust the government than citizens who view public officials as discriminatory, corrupt and inefficient, ceteris paribus. The evidence linking government service delivery to perceptions of government is weaker. Evidence from Africa also suggests that improvements in the integrity and fairness of the government and civil servants are likely to enhance citizens’ willingness to pay taxes, which will improve a government’s ability to provide services and maintain a competent and honest bureaucracy over time.
Results suggest that while improving services may not harm an incumbent government’s popularity, enhancing service delivery is unlikely to directly generate any significant short-term political returns for a government. PSM reforms are more likely to generate short-term positive political returns and longer-term gains for a government if it is able to improve perceptions of its bureaucracy and the fairness of government procedures. Further, we know from experiences around the world that governments are more likely to elicit its citizens’ approval, trust and legitimacy when bureaucrats including teachers, nurses, and agricultural extension agents treat those individuals with whom they interact on a day-to-day basis with dignity and provide services with a manageable amount of red tape and corruption.
The importance of procedural justice in eliciting support for governments is a strong finding of a large body of research, including historical and contemporary case studies, formal models and experiments. A reduction in discriminatory policies and behavior on the part of bureaucrats is likely to have a positive effect on citizens’ evaluations of their governments and their willingness to comply with the law. How we are to promote procedural fairness is compatible with PSM reforms: good public servants and transparency combined with institutional arrangements to provide effective voice and grievance procedures to those who experience discrimination.
I offer three possible explanations for the weak relationship between service delivery and perceptions of the government. First, citizens may primarily reward relative improvements in services or sanction relative deteriorations in services, rather than the absolute level of service quality that they receive. If services deteriorate or improve, citizens may alter their beliefs about governments’ performance and taxpayers should attempt to adjust their terms of trade with government. Determining how citizens learn to draw a cognitive link between improvements or a decline in their welfare and their obligations to government is fraught with difficulties. Citizens receive cues from government but also from neighbors, religious and traditional authorities and the media, or the government. Whether some signals are more effective than others may depend on the confidence citizens have in the messenger. Because the datasets used for this study are cross-sectional rather than longitudinal, I am unable to examine whether citizens adjust their beliefs and behavior to relative changes in service delivery.
Second, better service delivery may affect citizens’ approval of the incumbent government and trust in government only through its effect on improved outcomes that matter for citizens’ livelihoods. Unless improved services and infrastructure have a positive impact on citizens’ welfare, individuals are unlikely to credit the government for these outputs (Sacks and Levi 2010). Third, citizens in Latin America and Africa may not be attributing goods and services to the government. Rather, citizens may be attributing goods and services, such as roads, electricity grids, sewage systems, health care and education to donors and various non-state actors including the following: the private sector; NGOs and community-based groups; churches, mosques and other religious institutions; traditional leaders; and, bilateral and multilateral donors. Using data from a unique survey collected from 750 households in Zambia’s Eastern, Southern and Copperbelt provinces, Sacks (Forthcoming, 2011) finds that citizens are likely to incorrectly attribute government services to non-state actors when they are satisfied with services and when they live in areas with active service-delivery oriented NGOs, churches and donors.
The Antecedents of Approval of the Incumbent Government and Trust in Government in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and six Arab Countries
An effective government is one that protects the population from violence, ensures property rights and provides the infrastructure that makes possible the exchange of goods and delivery of services (Levi 2006, 5). An effective government is also one that is representative of and accountable to the population they are meant to serve (1997, 1988; Cook et al. 2005; Rothstein 2005). The more fair and effective a government is, the more support, trust and legitimacy that government is likely to attain and, the more it will possess the potential to elicit compliance without excessive monitoring or punitive action. Without trust and legitimacy, governments have difficulty maintaining social order, implementing their policies and obtaining external funds, loans, or other kinds of support.
Under what conditions are governments likely to implement public sector management (PSM) reforms? Only governments which are able to demonstrate its effectiveness to citizens and elicit their approval in the short-term and their trust and legitimacy in the longer-term will have the necessary leverage to implement PSM reforms. I investigate the extent to which approval of the incumbent government, trust in government and legitimating beliefs derive from government’s performance in delivering services, maintaining a competent and honest bureaucracy and adhering to procedurally just criteria.
The arguments in this paper are consistent with an important set of arguments and empirical analyses concerning the influence of fairness and procedural justice on approval andtrust in government, legitimating beliefs and compliance behavior with laws and regulations (Tyler 1990; Ayres and Braithwaite 1992; Braithwaite 2007; Sakurai and Braithwaite 2003). Based on studies of practices and citizens in single polities that are both economically advanced and democratic, the data in these analyses do not permit questions about what government does or fails to do to promote the belief that it is trustworthy and legitimate when state-building and democracy are still extremely fragile. Nor is there reflection on variations in regime or in the effectiveness and practices of particular countries. The findings of the literature on tax compliance and deference to authority in relatively well-functioning industrial democracies get at variations among groups, in terms of experience with government (Tyler and Huo 2002; Ahmed and Braithwaite 2007) and in terms of attitudes and motivational postures (Scholz and Lubell 1998; Scholz 1998; Braithwaite et al. 2007). But these authors do not provide a political geography of trust and legitimating beliefs in developing states.
Approval and Trust in Government and Legitimating Beliefs
In this paper, I model indicators of threeconceptually distinct although related concepts: satisfaction with the incumbent government; trust in government; and, legitimating beliefs. Citizens’ dissatisfaction with a government may not harm or even affect their trust in government and their legitimating beliefs. Citizens who view the underlying government institutions as legitimate, for example, are likely to quasi-voluntarily comply with laws and regulations even when they are dissatisfied with a specific government administration. Similarly, satisfaction with a particular government’s performance may not necessarily translate into greater trust or legitimating beliefs.
I use the concept of trust in government to refer to beliefs about the trustworthiness of government. Institutional trustworthiness implies procedures for selecting and constraining the agents of institutions so that they are competent, credible, and likely to act in the interests of those being asked to trust the institution. When citizens say they trust the government, they are stating a belief that, on average, its agents will prove to be trustworthy (Levi 1998, 80). Unfortunately, survey questions that probe respondents about their trust in government, the president or prime minister, or the public administration are quite problematic. First, there is an issue of the extent to which the same questions capture comparable attitudes in different segments of the population or across time. Second, there is also an issue that trust is usually quite domain-specific. As Cook, Hardin and Levi (2005, 164) argue, trust varies with the task, context and people involved. Consequently, we do not know what domain respondents have in mind when answering these questions. If a respondent answers a question that they trust a president, we do not know withwhat tasks the respondent trusts the president. It is highly unlikely that an individual would trust a president to handle all tasks in every possible context.
Governments that are viewed as trustworthy by citizens at the time of PSM reforms are likely to have substantially more political capital to experiment with such reforms than governments that are widely distrusted by citizens. Because of an asymmetry between trust and distrust, once governments lose the trust of citizens, it is hard for governments to win that trust back. Establishing that a government is trustworthy requires a lot more knowledge than establishing that a government is untrustworthy. “If you betray someone a single time, she is likely to distrust you thereafter, although she still might choose – or even be forced by a lack of alternatives – to take a risk on you again” (Cook, Hardin and Levi 2005: 63). The potential losses from cooperation with a government which proves to be untrustworthy are greater than the potential gains from cooperation with a government which proves to be trustworthy. Between a taxpayer and a tax collector, it may take several honest transactions to make up for one case of theft. Consequently, we tend to stop trying to cooperate with people who once fail our trust (Cook, Hardin and Levi 2005, 65).
Max Weber (1968), as well as several more contemporary scholars (see Gilley 2006, Greif 2010, Hechter 2009, Rothstein 1998, 2005, Swaine 2006, Tyler 1990, Tyler 2006 among many others), defines legitimacy in a manner that is distinct from trust. According to Weber, legitimacy facilitates the exercise of domination, a particular form of power (Weber 1968, 212-216). A legitimate ruler or government elicits willing deference and obedience by justifying its exercise of authority with arguments the populace believes are normatively appropriate. Legitimacy is a concept meant to capture the beliefs that bolster that willingness. When members of a polity view the political authorities and institutions of that polity as legitimate, they defer to the policies governments enact out of a normative obligation to do so. The widespread existence of legitimating beliefs reduces the transaction costs of governing by reducing reliance on coercion and monitoring.
Legitimacy does not signify that power will be used to promote the good of the nation or of humanity. As Weber (1968) points out, traditional and charismatic authority rest on beliefs that may be inconsistent with democracy, protection of human rights, or other factors that promote general economic well-being and relative equity. Legitimacy implies only that the populace acquiesces in the exercise of governmental power. I am not interested in all forms of legitimacy, but only that which promotes quasi-voluntary compliance with a government that might be considered relatively effective and fair. My conception of the reasons citizens trust government derives from Margaret Levi’s arguments about quasi-voluntary compliance. Quasi-voluntary compliance is compliance motivated by a willingness to comply but backed up by coercion, particularly coercion that ensures that others will be obeying the law(Levi 1988, 1997; Lieberman 2009). Of central importance is the belief that rules and regulations are entitled to be obeyed not only by virtue of who made the decision or how it was made (Tyler 2006, 377) but also by virtue of what government does for its citizens.
Distrust in government can actually enhance citizens’ legitimating beliefs. As Cook, Hardin and Levi (2006, chapter. 4) argue, the reliability of the state depends on an institutional design that builds in distrust. For example, to earn the trust of citizens, government actors place themselves in institutional arrangements that“tie their hands” and structure their incentives so as to make their best options those in which their individual benefits depend on the promotion of the public welfare. Scrutiny andenhanced attention to the actions of government agents may bolster citizens’trust in government. Yet, some types of deep distrust in government can lead to political mobilization intended to undermine the state (Cook, Hardin and Levi 2005)
For those of us concerned about improving the quality of government, we are interested in examining how individuals come to develop and accept current standards for normative appropriateness and how they are able to assess the extent to which a government meets those standards. Certainly, governments and politicians seeking trust or legitimation try to win or even buy approval, but they do not always succeed in winning popular endorsement or anything approaching legitimacy. Social scientists are still grappling with how to objectively assess the extent to which a government is effective, let alone demonstrate that citizens perceive it as such or translate that perception into approval, trust and legitimating beliefs. Iinvestigate the extent to which approval of the incumbent government, trust in government and legitimating beliefsderive from government’s performance in delivering services, maintaining a competent and honest bureaucracy and adhering to procedurally just criteria (see Figure 1). Individuals are less likely to approve and trust a government and view it as legitimate if they feel government is breaking its fiscal contract with them, exercising favoritism or revenge through its policies, or is unacceptably corrupt. In a forthcoming paper (see Sacks 2011), I examine how government effectiveness and fairness influence citizens’ reported compliance with taxes and fees
Theoretical Model
Government Effectiveness
Government Performance in Service Delivery
One possible basis of approval of the incumbent government’s performance and trust in government is the provision of public goods the population requires to ensure at least a minimal level of social welfare, e.g., drinkable water, roads, post offices, electricity, piped water and sanitation. Security of life and property are conditions of well-being and prerequisites for realizing a minimal level of social welfare. Some public goods, such as education or publicly provided health care, may matter more for certain groups or classes than for others. Some public goods also have a class dimension that may have consequences for what citizens understand as the fiscal contract. For example, everyone requires sanitation, but some may be satisfied with sewage management while others expect garbage collection, street-cleaning and flush toilets.