Relational State Building in Areas of Limited Statehood: Experimental Evidence on the Attitudes of the Police

Abstract

Under what conditions does state expansion into limited statehood areas improve perceptions of state authority? Although previous work emphasizes identity or institutional sources of state legitimacy, I argue that relationships between state agents and citizens drive positive attitude formation, because these relationships provide information and facilitate social bonds. Moreover, when state agents and citizens share demographic characteristics, perceptional effects may improve. Finally, citizens finding procedural interactions between state agents and citizens unfair may adopt negative views about the state. I test these three propositions by randomizing household visits by male or female police officers in rural Liberia. These visits facilitated relationship building, leading to improved perceptions of police; shared demographic characteristics between police and citizens did not strengthen this effect. Perceptions of unfairness in the randomization led to negative opinions about police. The results imply that relationship building between state agents and citizens is an important part of state building.

Gender, Law Enforcement, and Access to Justice: Evidence from All-Women Police Stations in India

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Representation in Healthcare Institutions Promotes Intergroup Tolerance: Evidence from the COVID-19 Crises in Israel and the US

“…While the existing literature has made important advances identifying the effects of descriptive representation on public goods provision, it has yet to consider whether and how such representation shapes intergroup relations. This oversight is rather surprising, as non-elected institutions and the agents within them interact frequently and intimately with citizens (Karim 2020;Pepinsky, Pierskalla and Sacks 2017;Lipsky 1980). To that extent, one may expect that the make-up of public institutions which impact citizens' daily lives may affect intergroup relations.…”

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“… 1 See especially Banerjee et al (2014); Blair et al (2018); Cooper (2018); Karim et al (2018); Karim (2018); Sahin et al (2017). An important initiative by the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network will test the effects of community policing across six different countries; see .…”