Network efficacy and Trust under Rebelocracy

• In Event: The Legacies of the Colombian Civil War: A Micro-level Approach

Abstract

This paper explores the role of exposure to armed conflict and rebelocracies in shaping the network efficacy of communities, defined as their capacity to use their social networks to solve collective action problems through the use of their connections, trust and trustworthiness. We use a set of incentivized field experiments in 8 villages, half of which have been exposed to a higher level of rebelocracy (capacity of an armed group to regulate social and economic activities) than their counter parts. Around 300 people from 8 villages in Colombia participated in our experiments in which they had to make incentivized decisions in a canonical version of the “Trust Game” and in a newly designed “Network Efficacy Game” where each household receives a unique random numerical code and has the possibility to share it with community neighbors. The more codes are acquired within a village by a single person, within a limited time-frame, the higher the monetary payoff to everyone in the community, regardless of having shared it with others. Our results suggest that the networks are more effective and dense in the villages where there has been a higher level of rebelocracy. Although inter-personal trust does not seem to vary between low and high rebelocracy, the reciprocal trustworthiness seems to be higher in the latter villages. These results may be explained by a historical process of adaptation by civil society to respond with stronger social networks for communication in case of external threats such as those brought by armed actors and as reflect of that “hidden power” (Scott, 1985; 1992) that communities build when subject to the forces of armed groups.

Author

• Juan C Cardenas, Dean and Professor