Third, we examine whether the results from Section 5.1 vary based on geographic variation of war violence. We estimate separate models for respondents from Kono district and respondents from Western Area Urban, which comprises Freetown. As Sierra Leone’s largest diamond-mining region, looting and fighting were ubiquitous throughout Kono during the war. On our measure of communities’ exposure to war violence, which ranges from one to four with four indicating the greatest exposure to war violence, the mean for Kono and Western Area Urban is 3.26 and 1.47, respectively. At the start of decentralization, Kono’s infrastructure was in a much worse state than Western Area Urban’s. For example, 69.72 of NPS respondents from Kono reported that the quality of the nearest road was “very poor (rough and unpaved)” and another 25.54 percent rated the quality of the nearest road as “poor (smooth and unpaved).” By comparison, only 29.14 percent and 30.88 percent of NPS respondents from Western Area Urban evaluated the closest road as very poor and poor, respectively. As individuals tend to reward relative, rather than absolute, improvements in the public goods they receive, we expect the effects of local government performance on beliefs about trustworthiness to be stronger for residents of Kono than for residents of Western Area Urban.

The separation plots in Figure 13 suggest that our model performs better for Kono than for the Western Area Urban district. As these plots show, the models only perform moderately well in assigning high probabilities to cases of trustworthiness and low probabilities to cases of distrust. The results from Kono and Western Area Urban are only partially consistent with our model on the full dataset (see Table 4). Whereas in Kono, the effect of having registered a family member’s death is positively and strongly associated with beliefs about local government officials’ trustworthiness, this variable is not significant in the regression on Western Area Urban. Experience with registering a family member’s death in 2007 corresponds to a percentage point increase of 42.7 in the predicted probability that a respondent from Kono will view councillors as trustworthy. Our indicator of the quality of health clinic infrastructure, the presence of a refrigerator in the community’s health clinic, is positive and significant on the Kono subset but not on the Western Area Urban subset. Compared to respondents who attend an NGO or mission clinic, respondents who attend a government clinic are less likely to view their local government representatives as trustworthy. We do not find any evidence of an association between the quality of education and our dependent variable in either Kono or Western Area Urban. In both Kono and Freetown, perceptions of local councillor’s honesty has a large relative effect on evaluations of councillors’ honesty.

In contrast to our full model, the results from Kono and Western Area Urban point to a relationship between ethnicity and beliefs about local authorities’ trustworthiness. On the one hand, respondents from Kono, who are members of the largest ethnic group in their ward, are more likely to view their local councillor as trustworthy. On the other hand, respondents from Western Area Urban, who are members of the largest ethnic group in their ward, are less likely to view their local councillor as trustworthy. Our indicator of ELF is statistically significant in the regression on Kono but not in the regression on Western Area Urban. In Kono, the higher the ethnic fractionalization of a ward, the more likely community members will view their councillor as trustworthy. In our future research, 22