(Non-)State Authority and Legitimate Violence: A Survey Experiment on Vigilantes and the Police in Nigeria

In this project, we investigate the micro-foundations of political authority in a context of fractured sovereignty, i.e. a situation where armed non-state actors compete with the state for authority and legitimacy. We gauge the attitudinal underpinnings of authority by assessing citizen attitudes to the state’s role as a security enforcer, when contrasted with non-state vigilante security providers. We field a survey experiment in Nigeria, gauging how citizens view this contrast. Our experiment probes several theoretical logics that are often assumed to affect state and nonstate authority, namely: performance legitimacy, procedural legitimacy, popular support, contractual legitimacy and the danger of the situation.