# **1 Introduction**

A broad consensus has emerged among practitioners and researchers that failure to build accountable and legitimate institutions is a critical risk factor associated with vicious circles of repeated violence (World Bank 2011). When disenchantment with poor governance and lack of improvement in service provision is pervasive, a negative feedback cycle might begin with citizens less willing to comply with government demands, laws and regulations. Over time, the inability of the state to deliver basic public services often presents opportunities for the emergence of rebel groups and other non-state actors that provide a credible and legitimate alternative to the state, eventually leading to civil war and the collapse of state authority (Bates, 2008 _a_ ).

This legacy of distrust and discontent poses an additional burden in a post-conflict and fragile environment, in which demands upon the state’s administrative apparatus are high as the government is under pressure to showing quick peace dividends across different groups within society (Call and Wyeth, 2008; World Bank, 2011). Decentralization reforms and local service provision have often been advocated as critical components of the peace-building and state-building process, and pursued as a tool for mitigating social tensions, rebuilding trustworthy state authorities and consequently, enhancing the prospects for political stability. Often backed by the financial and technical support of the international community, these decentralization reforms aiming to devolve basic service delivery functions have been designed to strengthen the decision-making power of local governments and empower the citizens of local communities with a greater policy-making and oversight role. If the performance of newly empowered local authorities matches the expectations of citizens, these reforms are expected to have a positive effect on citizens’ beliefs and holds “great potential to...prevent widespread disillusionment with new policies from turning into a rejection of the entire democratic process... [and] boost legitimacy by making government more responsive to citizen needs” (Diamond, 1999, pp. 124-125) The alleged benefits of decentralized public service provision have been largely debated in the academic literature, with special attention paid to its potential conflict-mitigation strategies in the context of fragile and ethnically diverse polities (Brancati, 2006; Horowitz, 1985; Treisman, 2007). Few studies test the extent to which local government performance and decentralized service provision shape citizens’ beliefs toward political authorities and enhance the prospects of political legitimacy. This paper contributes to fill this gap by examining the antecedents of trustworthy local government authorities in a post-conflict and fragile setting, Sierra Leone, using longitudinal household data that was collected one year after an ambitious program of decentralization reform was launched and two times thereafter. Our argument is that the quality of decentralized public services, as well as the competence and perceived honesty of local government authorities, shape citizens’ beliefs towards local political authorities. In other work (Sacks and Larizza, 2011), we examine how government trustworthiness translates into behavioral legitimacy, as reflected by quasivoluntary compliance with state demands. Together, these studies complement other ongoing research examining the development of procedural justice and its role in generating beliefs about state legitimacy in rural and peri-urban Sierra Leone (Manning, 2008, 2009).

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