rounds of surveys covered the same enumeration areas and interviewed the same respondent or household, if possible.<sup>3</sup> Community-level questionnaires were also conducted in 2007 and 2008 NPS.<sup>4</sup> In our analysis, we aggregate the community-level data to the enumeration area, which we then merged with the NPS household-level data at the enumeration area level.

Unfortunately, the questions on the 2007 and 2008 surveys only include a limited number of questions that were included in the 2005 surveys. As a result, the emphasis of this paper is on the analysis of the 2007 and 2008 rounds of survey data, which includes a richer set of measures of service delivery, administrative competence and honesty.<sup>5</sup>

# **4.2 Measures**

## **4.2.1 Dependent Variable**

There is a large literature that models generalized trust, or how much citizens trust the government. Survey questions that probe respondents about their trust in government are problematic for several reasons. First, there is an issue of the extent to which the same questions capture comparable attitudes in different segments of the population or across time. Second, trust is usually quite domain-specific. As Cook, Hardin and Levi (2005, p. 164) argue, trust varies with the task, context and people involved. Consequently, we do not know the domain which respondents have in mind when answering questions about trust. If a respondent answers that they trust a president, we do not know with what tasks the respondent trusts the president. It is highly unlikely that an individual would trust a president to handle all tasks in every possible context.

To deal with this problem, we model beliefs about the trustworthiness of local government officials rather than a vague notion of trust in government as an institution. Specifically, respondents were asked: “In your opinion, do you believe local councillors or do you have to be careful dealing with them?” By capturing interpersonal trust of specific government officials, these indicators are certainly preferably to generalized trust questions.<sup>6</sup> Also, the longitudinal nature of our dataset provides us with the ability to capture comparable beliefs

> 3From 2005 to 2007, 68 percent percent of the respondents from 2005 were re-interviewed, and in another 20 percent of cases, a different person from the same household was interviewed. From 2007 to 2008, 64 percent of the respondents from 2007 were re-interviewed, and in another 19 percent of cases, a different person from the same household was interviewed. In other cases, the household living at the same address was interviewed or a new household was selected from the census books (IRCBP Evaluation Unit, 2010).

> 4One or two community modules were completed in each enumeration area, depending on whether the area consisted of multiple small villages (IRCBP Evaluation Unit, 2010).

> 5For the next version of the paper, we plan to re-estimate the models using Amelia to impute missing data. For this version, we omitted the responses on our dependent variable that were either missing or coded as “don’t know”, “not enough info” or “neutral”. Only 6.48 percent of the responses fall into one of these three categories. We model responses on our independent variables that our coded as “don’t know” or “missing” (Honaker, King and Blackwell, November 4, 2010)

> 6Despite its advantages, our indicator still suffers from the problem that it is not domain specific. While methodologically stronger, a domain-specific question would have created additional complications in administering the surveys and translating the questionnaires into local languages.

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