How Leaders Gain Compliance: Survey Experiments on Variation by Activity

• In Event: The State and Traditional Governance Nexus: Empirical Evidence from Africa

Abstract

The question of what motivates compliance with authority is critical for how we understand social cooperation, public goods provision and political participation. Yet, we have limited evidence on whether leaders’ authority -- both its extent and its basis -- transcends or is bounded by different activities. Existing empirical work tends to focus on explaining a leader’s ability to motivate community compliance in a single realm, although neopatrimonial theories would suggest that this influence travels to other types of communal activities too. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by offering insights into an open empirical question: Which authorities have the most influence over which types of activities? Moreover, what is the basis of their influence and how does this vary by leader and realm? To answer these questions, we employ conjoint experiments that allow us to measure how different bases of authority may influence the ability of different leaders to gain compliance for three different activities: contributions to burial funds, contributions to educational funds, or voting. The experimental arms are designed to allow us to explore whether coercion, coordination, or legitimacy drive individuals’ willingness to comply with leaders’ directives in these areas. We embed this experiment in the Local Governance Performance Index (LGPI) implemented in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia. Doing so allows us to examine the relationship between community- and individual-level factors, the strength of different actors in different contexts, and the factors underlying their influence.

Authors

• Katharine A. Baldwin, Yale University

• Ellen M. Lust, University of Gothenburg