Trust in State and Non-State Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan

Daron Acemoglu, Ali Cheema, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and James A. Robinson

No 369, CID Working Papers from Center for International Development at Harvard University

Abstract: Lack of trust in state institutions, often due to poor service provision, is a pervasive problem in many developing countries. It may also be one of the reasons citizens turn to non-state actors for services. This paper investigates whether information about improved public services can help build trust in state institutions and move people away from non-state actors. We focus on dispute resolution in rural Pakistan. We find that (truthful) information about reduced delays in state courts leads to citizens reporting higher likelihood of using them and to greater allocations to the state in two high-stakes lab-in-the-field games designed to measure belief in the effectiveness of state courts and willingness to contribute resources for others to access them. More interestingly, we find indirect negative effects on non-state actors in the same high-stakes settings. We show that the positive direct and negative indirect effects are both mediated by changes in beliefs about the effectiveness of these actors. Our preferred interpretation explains these behaviors as a response to improved beliefs about state actors which then motivate individuals to interact less with non-state actors and as a result downgrade their beliefs about them. We provide additional checks bolstering this interpretation and alleviating concerns about potential social experimenter effects or mechanical contrasts between the two actors. These results indicate that, despite distrust of the state in Pakistan, credible new information can change beliefs and behavior.

Keywords: dispute resolution; lab-in-the-field games; legitimacy; motivated reasoning; non-state actors; state capacity; trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C93 D02 D73 D74 D83 K40 O17 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-law and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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https://growthlab.cid.harvard.edu/files/growthlab/ ... -trust-in-actors.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Trust in State and Nonstate Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan (2020)
Working Paper: Trust in State and Non-State Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cid:wpfacu:369

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