The forthcoming article “Is authority fungible? Legitimacy, domain congruence, and the limits of power in Africa” by Kate Baldwin, Kristen Kao, and Ellen Lust is summarized by the author(s) below.
Scholars, policymakers, and development practitioners recognize that leaders’ de facto authority often differs significantly from their de jure powers, but they lack a clear understanding of what limits authority. Previous research has found leaders take on roles beyond their formal responsibilities, for example by organizing labor for community projects, collecting taxes, and brokering voter turnout. Studies have also shown leaders are more effective in mobilizing over some activities than others. For instance, Malawian religious leaders were more effective in getting people not to attend public gatherings during the Covid-19 pandemic than in asking them to take other precautionary measures, like handwashing. But questions remain: if leaders act in ways beyond their legally prescribed responsibilities and do so with varied effect, what explains the limits to their authority?
We argue that leaders have advantages in organizing citizens’ compliance with activities that match their domain of authority, or for which they have “domain congruence.” In our study, we operationalize domain congruence by considering the degree of match between leaders and activities on two dimensions: geographic scope (local versus supra-local) and field of expertise (customary versus state). When there are greater matches between leaders and activities on these dimensions, leaders should be more effective in mobilizing citizen compliance.
We employ survey experiments in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia to test whether domain congruence predicts citizens’ willingness to comply with leader requests across different activities and examine the mechanisms that explain its importance. Specifically, we study how calls from members of parliament, local councilors, and local chiefs may influence citizens’ expressed compliance across three activities: voting for a particular candidate in presidential elections, contributing to an education fund, and contributing to a burial fund. This allows us to consider how leaders with different geographic (local versus supralocal) and substantive (customary vs. state) domains can mobilize citizens in activities realized at the local versus supra-local level and requiring customary versus state expertise. Our experimental design also permits us to explore whether sanctioning, coordination, or legitimacy better explain individuals’ willingness to comply with leaders’ directives.
We find that limits on leaders’ authority exist and that the concept of domain congruence helps predict the activities over which leaders have greatest influence. Moreover, leaders’ domain legitimacy – the belief that it is right and proper for the leader to demand citizens’ engagement over certain activities – may underpin the relationship between domain congruence and authority.
These results have important implications. For scholars, they suggest that leaders’ influence cannot be studied in the absence of specific contexts and activities and that general measures of authority (including trust in leaders) are insufficient to understand how much power leaders will have in organizing citizens for particular purposes. Research designs that stylize authorities or activities, often divorcing them from each other, are thus limited, as are studies that seek to understand leaders’ influence by focusing on single types of leaders or activities. For practitioners and policymakers, our study suggests that leaders who have greater domain congruence should be better at mobilizing participation behind particular projects. Thus, programs and policies that take domain congruence into account are likely to be more effective.
About the Author(s): Kate Baldwin is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University, Kristen Kao is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, and Ellen Lust is the Founding Director of the Governance and Local Development Institute at Yale University and the University of Gothenburg and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. Their research “Is authority fungible? Legitimacy, domain congruence, and the limits of power in Africa“ is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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