partially control for the possibility that NGO activity might affect citizens’ beliefs toward local authorities.

# **Social Capital**

Membership in community-level associations, such as religious organizations, unions and farmers’ groups, may affect individuals’ judgements about local councillors’ trustworthiness. Through interacting in voluntary associations, members share information that they can use when evaluating governments (Theiss-Morse and Hibbing, 2005). Others argue that there may be a spill over effect from learning to trust other members in a voluntary associations to learning to trust others in different contexts (Nannestad, 2008, pp. 422-423). Although the theoretical and empirical evidence linking membership in voluntary associations to trust in government is mixed, we control for individuals’ membership in a political party, religious organization and a credit or savings group (i.e. a cooperative).<sup>9</sup>

# **Ethnicity and Political Identities**

Ethnicity in Sierra Leone traditionally plays an important role in shaping citizens’ political identities and their attitudes toward government authorities. At a glance, Sierra Leone looks like a highly fragmented and heterogeneous country. In Easterly and Levine’s list of the most ethno-linguistically fractionalized countries in the world, Sierra Leone ranks fifteenth. This picture is misleading as the three largest ethnic groups (Mende, Temne, and Limba) command roughly 70 percent of the population, while none of the other 10 ethnic groups exceed a 10 percent share of the population (Casey, 2010). Moreover, the distribution of the major ethnic groups is not random and instead highly conterminous with regions. Figure 6 shows the distribution of Sierra Leone’s four largest ethnic groups across enumeration areas. Since independence from British rule, the regional-base distribution provided a strong incentive for political parties to mobilize their constituencies along ethnic lines. These patterns remained resilient in the post-conflict environment with the APC party strongly associated with the Temne and Limba groups in the north and the west, while the SLPP is strongly associated with the Mende, Kissi and Sherbro groups in the south and east (Kandeh, 1992). This rigid ethnic make-up of the two main political parties implies that citizens’ views about local councillors’ trustworthiness might be driven by their ethnic membership and/or political allegiances regardless of the quality of services they receive.

Taking into account the salience of ethnic politics in Sierra Leone, we used the NPS self-reported data on ethnicity to identify whether the respondent belongs to the majority ethnic group. Following Glennerster, Miguel and Rothenberg (2010, 6-7), we then use the 2004 Census data to calculate the share of the total population size of an enumeration area that belongs to various ethnic groups. Using these shares, we calculate the standard ethno-linguistic fractionalization index (ELF). Figure 7 also shows that the level of ethnic

> 9We did not create an index out of these variables since factor analysis suggests that the questions about involvement in various organizations tap different behavioral concepts.

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