Does Information about the Formal Justice Sector Change Perceptions of the State

• In Event: Local Politics in Developing Countries: Experiencing and Engaging with the State

Abstract

In many developing countries, the central state has little presence and citizens have little familiarity with the central state’s role or how it operates. When it comes to solving justice issues, citizens rely primarily on local mechanisms, such as arbitration by traditional leaders, and not the formal court system. We study a USAID-funded public information campaign implemented in Mali, a setting characterized by just these kinds of constraints on the use of the formal justice system by ordinary citizens. In the intervention, four civil society organizations ran village meetings in which they described the basic functioning of the Malian justice system and people's inheritance rights under the country’s formal laws. We randomly assigned the information campaign to different villages in order to assess how the program changed people's knowledge of and opinions about the formal justice system. Our study also assesses whether learning more about formal sector institutions changes people's attitudes toward the state overall.

Authors

• Matthew S. Winters, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Jeffrey K. Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State University