Undemocratic but Accountable? The Role of Sanctioning Institutions in Sustaining Good Leadership in Rural Sierra Leone

Do citizens sanction undemocratic traditional leaders and how? Does these sanctions help sustaining social cooperation and the provision of public good? In societies where the socio-economic and political spheres are embedded, I expect reciprocity institutions to be at the heart of bottom-up accountability mechanism. I test whether citizens sanction their chief using a range of socio-economic actions, according to their relative costs. The study disentangles the relationships between horizontal and bottom-up accountability mechanisms expected to be substitute to one another. I test these hypotheses using a survey experiment with 900 participants in 80 villages around the Sherbro River Estuary and Yawri Bay in Sierra Leone. The experimental design determines how sanctioning mechanisms operate, and grasps the diversity of sanctioning practices according to citizens' social and economic status. Using additional measurements strategies and satellite images, I further explore whether strong sanctioning institutions at the village level are associated with better leadership and resource governance outcomes such as deforestation rates. Overall, the project aims to contribute to both the literature on traditional institutions and common-pool resources by testing the importance of bottom-up accountability mechanisms.