listening to their complaints and responding with respect and genuine concern, constituents are likely to develop a positive view of their councillors and more generally, state institutions (Cook, Hardin and Levi, 2005; Lipsky, 1980). A large literature on politics in Africa suggests that politicians reach out to their constituents, at least in part, by distributing targeted material goods (Posner, 2005; Wantchekon, 2003). Empirical research also suggests that households which have greater access to information are more likely to receive targeted benefits from government programs (Keefer and Khemani, 2012, p. 5). The more informed citizens are about government programs, the more likely they are to try and hold government accountable for delivering these benefits. The expectation that informed citizens will push for government accountability motivates governments to deliver more benefits to citizens with greater media access (Besley and Burgess, 2002). Citizens access to information about local council efforts can impact their perceptions of councillors either positively or negatively depending on the extent to which the news is critical of government.

A large literature argues and using experimental and survey evidence, shows that individuals tend to view their co-ethnics as more trustworthy (Barr, 2004; Eifert, Miguel and N, 2010; Fearon and Laitin, 1996; Gambetta, 1988; Habyarimana et al., 2007, 2009; Horowitz, 1985). Using experimental techniques, Habyarimana et al. (2009) reviewed and tested three possible mechanisms that might explain why individuals are more likely to trust their coethnics. Ethnicity is also likely to affect the quality of service provision. When politicians can make credible pre-electoral commitments to only a narrow section of the electorate, such as their co-ethnics, governments tend to prefer to pursue clientelistic policies resulting in lower public goods provision (Keefer and Vlaicu, 2008). In addition to these three alternative hypotheses, we also examine whether beliefs about councillors’ trustworthiness are associated with a household’s past exposure to war violence, their participation in community associations and their demographic characteristics.

# **3 Case-Selection: Sierra Leone**

For several reasons, the case of post-conflict Sierra Leone provides a justifiable context to test the antecedents of trustworthy government. The protracted nature of the decentralization process has yielded sub-national variation on several key dimensions of interest. In 2004, an ambitious program of decentralization reforms was launched by the national government with significant support from the donor community. Since then, two rounds of nation-wide local elections were completed, while a simple system of inter-governmental fiscal transfer was set up enabling local councils to carry out the service delivery functions devolved to them and to meet their administrative costs (Larizza and Glynn, 2011). However, this process of organizational reconstructing is occurring unevenly across time and across sub-national units. As a result, there is significant variation in our key independent variables including the administrative capacity of councils and the ability of councils to delivery services. We exploit the sub-national variation and test our hypothesis using a particularly rich set of survey data that has been collected in Sierra Leone to monitor the implementation of the decentralization reform program.

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