To test our hypothesis, we take advantage of a unique longitudinal survey on the National Public Services (NPS) covering over 6,000 households throughout Sierra Leone and use multilevel models to exploit variation over time and within and across sub-national units in Sierra Leone. Our analysis shows that the quality of decentralized service delivery is positively associated with views of local government authorities as trustworthy. We also find that the perceived honesty of councillors is positively correlated with councillors’ trustworthiness and that this finding is stronger in more remote communities. These results are robust to controls for alternative determinants of trust including ethnicity, the history of war violence, NGO service provision, councillors’ outreach efforts, social capital, and political party affiliation. Our findings speak to the possibility that decentralization reforms aiming to improve local service provision will help to overcome long-lasting patterns of popular discontent and distrust toward political authorities and to enhance the prospects of political stability in Sierra Leone.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 outlines the theoretical framework and reviews the empirical literature on the links between government performance, administrative competence and honesty, and trustworthy government. Section 3 describes the advantages of the Sierra Leone case-study while Section 4 describe our data, measures and methods. In Section 5, we analyze the sources of beliefs about the trustworthiness of local government officials and discuss the results. Finally, in Section 6, we consider the relevance and policy implications of our findings for the ongoing efforts to support local governments and build accountable institutions in post-conflict and fragile settings.

# **2 Theoretical Framework**

## **2.1 Trustworthy Government: Sources and Consequences**

The majority of governments, especially those in transitional and post-conflict societies, are struggling to establish regimes of widespread compliance based on legitimacy and not solely upon coercion. A government perceived as legitimate can expect widespread public cooperation for such voluntary acts as voting, adherence to public health recommendations (Lieberman, 2007) and participation in community problem solving, as well as quasi-voluntary compliance with taxes (Levi and Sacks, 2009). Legitimating beliefs, or the obligation to defer to government (Weber, 1968), rests, in part, on evaluations that government is objectively meeting the normative criteria a citizen possesses about what government should be doing. One of the most important antecedent conditions of value-based legitimacy is the trustworthiness of government. A belief that government is trustworthy reflects judgments that authorities are motivated to deliver on their promises and to do what is right for the people that they serve. The trustworthiness of political authorities is also enhanced by positive assessments of government’s performance in delivering essential public goods and services and its administrative competence (Cook, Hardin and Levi, 2005; Levi, 1988; Rothstein, 2005). The other important antecedent is the extent to which government upholds procedural justice (Levi, Sacks and Tyler, 2009; Tyler, 2006).

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