Traditional authorities, the state, and security provision in Africa

Chiefs play a key role in the provision of public goods across Sub-Saharan Africa. By drawing their authority from traditional, hereditary structures, they represent a paradox for the modern state, existing as both undemocratic local strongmen and highly embedded bureaucrats that serve as an conduit between citizens and governments (Baldwin 2015). Traditional authorities fulfil a range of governance roles, with particular attention devoted to their role overseeing provision of basic public goods (Diaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, and Ruiz-Euler 2014; Wilfahrt 2018), dispute resolution channels over land tenure (Honig 2022), and implementation of develop- ment/infrastructure projects (Dansoh, Frimpong, and Oppong 2020). Their role is particularly important in rural areas, where the central formal-legal state often has weaker presence (Henn 2023; Cooper 2019). A growing strand of literature examines how traditional authorities and the state interact. For some, this relationship is characterised by complementarity, a dynamic whereby both actors are seen as equally legitimate, and may co-provide or coordinate the provision of public goods to their citizens. On the other hand, substitution captures cases where either the state or the traditional authority supplants the other in the provision of public goods (Baldwin 2015; Honig 2022; Van Der Windt et al. 2019; Henn 2023). Others reject this binary classification, instead arguing that which actor provides a given public good depends on their relative expertise. For instance, Baldwin, Kao, and Lust 2023 introduce the concept of “domain congruence” to acknowledge that certain actors are specialized in certain policy areas (domains), and that citizens are more likely to see actors that are specialized (congruent) as more legitimate. In this project, we turn to a less studied public good that both the state and traditional authorities might provide; security. Security, or “the absence of threats to a defined social group” (Chojnacki and Branovic 2013, p. 89), is a core public or collective good which undergirds the provision of essentially all others (Baker and Scheye 2007; Cooper-Knock, Berg, and Diphoorn 2024; Krahmann 2008; Lee, Walter-Drop, and Wiesel 2014; Krahmann 2008). Despite its importance, though, security is often overlooked in both the literature on traditional authority and more widely in comparative politics. Security provides useful analytical leverage to study traditional authority, since in much of the world it is provided by both the formal-legal state and a host of non-state actors. These can include local self-defense groups, vigilante groups, militias, or private security companies. Traditional authorities play a key role in certain features of security provision, like coordinating dispute resolution and sanctions following local crimes. The state, in turn, may handle the most serious crimes while local actors fill gaps in coverage (Brailey and Sanchez-Bellosta 2026). But the formal authority of traditional figures is more opaque than for other types of public goods, since it is the state, above all, that maintains de jure authority to enforce security, through means of legitimate violence, within its territory (Dreier and Lake 2019). On the one hand, security becomes analogous to debates around “domain congruence”, since different actors have the local expertise and legitimacy to provide different services. But unlike other types of public goods, there is something essentially different about security provision that makes it harder to cleanly categorise, given that it is the foundation of both other public goods, and the formal-legal state’s broader legitimacy to rule. In this design, we provide one of the first tests of how citizens view the role of traditional leaders and the state in the provision of local security. We do so through a series of survey experiments in rural Malawi, addressing how different actors respond to different types of thefts in their community. Thefts are a core component of local security, since they undermine the property rights on which society and the wider economy is based. They are also common in wider range of low-income countries, including Malawi, where local militias and private security companies do not play a significant role. We pre-register two experiments, embedded in a survey of approximately 800 respondents across three districts. Respondents first face a vignette experiment that varies different categories of theft and the actors who respond. Through a range of outcome measures, we will document how effective and appropriate each actor is seen to be, whether respondents prefer traditional authorities and the state to work together or not, and how this shapes willingness to make financial contributions to the work of different groups. We buttress these measures with a forced choice conjoint, in which we vary further features about the theft and actors’ response to it in order to highlight specific determinants of respondents’ preferences. The study contributes to debates on state–traditional authority relations, by foregrounding a public good that resists simple domain congruence and by modelling both legitimacy and effectiveness as distinct dimensions of how citizens evaluate service provision. A second and related contribution of this work is to provide a more detailed and nuanced evaluation of the relationship between state and traditional authorities, focusing in on a specific public and under-researched type of public good.