State Capacity and Community Justice: Experimental Evidence from South Africa.

• In Event: Experiments on Communities and State Capacity

Abstract

Throughout the developing world, individuals are often reluctant to rely on the state’s security apparatus and, instead, turn to informal justice institutions. In this project, I seek to understand the micro dynamics that underly the relationship between state capacity and the willingness to make use of formal and informal ways to deal with crime. On the one hand, citizens who perceive state institutions as capable may expect them to provide a better service to those with criminal complaints, which may cause citizens to substitute away from informal solutions. On the other hand, a more capable state may have a greater ability to rule out extra-judicial forms of criminal justice by placing sanctions on those involved. To disentangle these mechanisms, I rely on a field experiment in South Africa, a context where victims of crime often turn to their neighbors rather than to the police. The consequence is a high prevalence of “mob justice,” the physical punishment of alleged criminals by groups of ordinary community members. The experiment created local variation in the capacity of the police by equipping a randomly selected set of households with an alarm system linking them to their closest police station. The alarm system was designed to make it easier for the police to respond to emergencies in a given household. The names and contact details of alarm owners are on file at the police station, which may also make it easier for the police to identify and track down alarm owners who engage in illegal behavior including mob justice. The results suggest that the treatment increased the willingness to rely on the police. Moreover, alarm owners seem to both expect better police service quality and perceive a higher risk of legal sanctions were they to engage in illegal behavior. Effects on the willingness to participate in and rely on mob justice are concentrated among those who did not expect legal sanctions for mob justice at baseline. Moreover, these effects seem strongest when the alarm system is combined with an information treatment that portrays the police as taking a strong stance against mob justice. The findings thus point towards the importance of the expectation of legal sanctions rather than improved service delivery as a link between state capacity and community justice.

Author

• Anna Maria Wilke, Columbia University