Institutional legitimacy in Sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

How do personal encounters with legal institutions shape citizens’ confidence in those institutions throughout sub-Saharan Africa? Using Afrobarometer’s cross-national citizen survey, we show that negative first-hand experiences with government courts and police erode citizens’ trust in those state institutions but do not tend to disrupt citizens’ perceptions of their authority to arbitrate or enforce the law. Individuals from diverse demographic backgrounds imbue state institutions with the right to perform their governance and law-enforcement duties, even after experiencing institutional incompetence or injustice. This article advances existing comparative research on legal institutions, which tends to conflate trust and legitimacy and overlooks the distinction between de facto performance and de jure authority. We suggest that rule-of-law institutions have deeper roots than some scholars have previously supposed.

KEYWORDS:

• Rule of law
• legitimacy
• trust
• governance
• state authority
• institutions
• courts

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Daniel Berliner, Cathy Boone, Loren Collingwood, Laura Mann, and Joachim Wehner for their helpful comments and feedback on earlier drafts. The authors also thank Carmin Alpin and Omar García Ponce for helpfully sharing Afrobarometer data and answering questions. All errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Signé and Korha, “Horizontal Accountability,” 1254–71.

2 Englebert and Matthews, “On Democratization and State-Building in Africa”; Englebert and Tull, “Postconflict Reconstruction in Africa,” 106–39; Herbst and Mills, “There Is No Congo.”

3 Sub-Saharan countries included in this analysis are as follows: Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. We exclude four North African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia) and three island micro-nations (Cabo Verde, Mauritius and São Tomé and Príncipe) surveyed by Afrobarometer. All models include country fixed effects.

4 Bottoms and Tankebe, “Beyond Procedural Justice,” 148–9.

5 Bayart, The State in Africa, 4.

6 Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail; Herbst, States and Power in Africa; Robinson, “States and Power in Africa,” 510–19; Ackerman and Palifka, Corruption and Government.

7 Cheeseman, Democracy in Africa; Cheeseman, Institutions and Democracy in Africa.

8 Pitcher, Moran, and Johnston, “Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa.”

9 Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even.

10 Cheeseman, “Democracy in Africa”; Pitcher, Moran, and Johnston, “Rethinking Patrimonialism,” 125–56.

11 Berry, No Condition Is Permanent; Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention,” 3–27.

12 Berman et al., “Election Fairness”; Bjornlund, “Beyond Free and Fair”; Carothers, “Promoting the Rule of Law”; Cheeseman, “Democracy in Africa”; Engerman and Sokoloff, “How Latin America Fell”; Knack and Keefer, “Institutions and Economic Performance”; Neumayer, “Do International Human Rights Treaties”; Weingast, “Why Developing Countries”; Widner, “Courts and Democracy.”

13 Bech Seeberg, Wahman, and Skaaning, “Candidate Nomination.”

14 Morse, “Presidential Power,” 709–27.

15 Cranenburgh, “Democracy Promotion in Africa,” 443–61.

16 Lipset, “The Social Requisites,” 86, defines legitimacy as the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for that society. Lake, “Building Legitimate States” elaborates by incorporating compliance as a critical component of legitimacy: “the right to issue certain commands … [with which citizens], in turn, have an obligation or duty to comply.” For further discussion of why people defer to decisions with which they disagree, see Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence, “Why do People”; Gibson, “Understandings of Justice”; Gibson, Caldeira, and Baird, “On the Legitimacy”. Migdal and Schlicte note that the state generates domination through “a uniform set of rules on how to behave (formal law, bureaucratic regulations, judicial precedents, customary procedures, and more).” They elaborate that “there is uniformity in the idea of the state, a standard understanding of what a state is” (Migdal and Schlicte, “Rethinking the State,” 18). See also: Tyler, “Why People Obey,” 25; also Beetham, “The Legitimation of Power”; Lahti, “Towards a Rational.”

17 Blair and Kalmanovitz, “On the Rights of”; Caldeira, “Neither the Purse”; Grimes, “Organizing Consent”; Smith, “Rejecting Rights.”

18 Rose-Ackerman, “Establishing the Rule of Law”; Rose-Ackerman and Palifka, Corruption and Government.

19 Herbst, States and Power in Africa.

20 Norris and Newton, “Confidence in Institutions.”

21 Levi, Sacks, and Tyler, “Conceptualizing Legitimacy.”

22 Caldeira, “Neither the Purse”; Chanley, Rudolph, and Rahn, “The Origins and Consequences”; Cook, Levi, and Hardin, “Whom Can We Trust”; Montinolla, “Proxies and Experiences”; Tenkebe, “Public Cooperation.”

23 Norris and Newton, “Confidence in Institutions.”

24 Reisig and Parks, “Experience, Quality of Life, and Neighborhood Context.”

25 Stillman, “The Concept of Legitimacy,” 32–56. See also: Brick, Taylor, and Esbensen “Juvenile Attitudes Towards the Police”; Hurst and Frank, “How Kids View Cops”; Kahn and Martin, “Policing and Race.”

26 Huq et al., “Monopolizing Force?”

27 Scheingold, The Politics of Rights.

28 Weaver and Lerman, “Political Consequences of the Carceral State.”

29 Long targets of state-based discrimination, incarceration, and violence, African Americans in the United States are nearly 30 percent less likely to espouse faith in the police than are whites Gallup, “Public Opinion Context”. Combined 2011–2014 data measuring Americans’ confidence in the police shows that 59% of whites have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the police, compared with 37% of blacks Gallup Gallup Inc., “Gallup Review: Black and White Attitudes Toward Police,” Gallup.com, 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/175088/gallup-review-black-white-attitudes-toward-police.aspx. The gap in confidence in institutions between blacks and whites for the past three years (2014–2016) increased to 29 percentage points. Combined data from 2014 to 216 shows that fifty-eight percent of whites have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police in the police, compared with only 29% of blacks stating that they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence.

30 Perceived authority is similar to what Sacks (Can Donors and Non-State Actors Undermine Citizens’ Legitimating Beliefs?, 3) has termed value-based legitimacy, or “a sense of obligation or willingness to obey authorities”.

31 Stillman, “The Concept of Legitimacy,” 32–56.

32 Easton, “A Reassessment of the Concept of Political Support,” 436.

33 Seligson, “The Impact of Corruption on Regime Legitimacy,” 408–33.

34 Brems, Corradi, and Schotsmans, International Actors and Traditional Justice in Sub-Saharan Africa; Kerr and Mobekk, Peace and Justice; Mutua, Human Rights; Zeleza and McConnaughay, Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Development in Africa; Easton, “A Reassessment of the Concept of Political Support,” 435–57; Stillman, “The Concept of Legitimacy,” 32–56; Baldwin, The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs.

35 Easton “A Reassessment of the Concept of Political Support,” 444.

36 McClymont and Golub, “Many Roads to Justice”; North, “Institutions, Institutional Change”; Rothstein and Stolle, “The State and Social.”

37 Seligson, “The Impact of Corruption on Regime Legitimacy,” 408–33.

38 Ewick and Silbey, “The Common Place”; Silbey, “After Legal Consiousness,” 334.

39 Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even.

40 Haynes, “Religion and Democratization.”

41 Brems, Corradi, and Schotsmans, International Actors and Traditional Justice in Sub-Saharan Africa; Kerr and Mobekk, Peace and Justice; Mutua, Human Rights; Zeleza and McConnaughay, Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Development in Africa.

42 Choirat, Honaker, Imai, King, and Lau, Zelig: Everyone's; Imai, King, and Lau “Toward A Common Framework for Statistical Analysis and Development”.

43 Afrobarometer Round 6.

44 Easton, “A Reassessment of the Concept of Political Support”; Stillman, “The Concept of Legitimacy.”

45 Easton, “A Reassessment of the Concept of Political Support,” 444.

46 Colonial legal institutions and principles have maintained strength, legitimacy, and normative sway in a variety of African contexts, despite elites’ efforts toward, and citizens’ demands for, autonomy and self-determination from their former colonial oppressors (see, for example, Dreier “Resisting Imperialism”).

47 Lake, Muthaka, and Walker, “Gendering Justice,” 539–74.

48 Figure 1 plots probabilities of respondents exhibiting no trust in government courts among three separate models with the following independent binary variables: negative court experience, positive court experience, and no court experience. Figure 3 similarly plots probabilities of respondents exhibiting no trust in police among three separate models with the following independent binary variables: police assistance difficult, police assistance easy, and no police experience.

49 Alexandre, “Perception of Corruption by Traffic Police,” 1–12.

50 We excluded perceptions about ethnic persecution and government suppression of political opposition because these questions were not asked in some countries surveyed. For a discussion of state suppression of political opposition parties throughout Africa, see Moroff, “Party Bans in Africa,” 618–41.

51 This finding aligns with Basedau et al., “Ethnicity and Party Preference,” 462–89’s argument that ethnicity does not clearly map on to party-system preferences throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

52 Baldwin, The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Africa.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah K. Dreier

Sarah K. Dreier is an NSF Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington's Department of Political Science.

Milli Lake

Milli Lake is an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics' International Relations Department.