State Building via Punitive and Restorative Justice: Evidence from a Field Experiment

本项目旨在解决国家形成的一个基本问题：在缺乏税收能力的情况下，弱国和脆弱国如何变得强大？我们测试了一个可能的答案：伸张正义，解决争端。虽然政策制定者和经济学家往往把重点放在征税权上，但历史记录表明，争端解决可能为建立能够为其公民提供商品和服务的强大国家提供有用的第一步。我们将提供关于如何在脆弱的冲突后环境中建立国家能力和合法性的实验证据，以及不同类型的争端解决方法如何有助于实现这一目标。我们特别研究了国家和非国家司法手段的有效性。研究这些问题将促进政治经济学和发展经济学领域的知识，并对福利产生关键影响。我们与地方政府和一个非政府组织的合作加强了学术界、公民社会和政府之间的伙伴关系，这本身就是一个基于证据的决策的直接例子。为此，我们考察了由司法部和当地一家非政府组织在目标城市大规模实施的随机推出的法律能力建设项目。该项目有(1)“惩罚性”法律能力建设部门，由州律师担任社区法律代表，并提供补贴服务；(2)“恢复性”法律能力建设部门，由社区领导人履行同样的职能。我们的目标是实证检验该计划对财产权安全、犯罪、暴力和公民为正式国家纳税意愿的影响。这样做将有助于我们更好地理解，当向公民征税的能力一开始就很低的时候，强大的国家是如何崛起的：通过法律途径（而不是财政途径）实现国家能力，即提供更多诉诸司法的渠道，并有效、公平地解决争端。此外，在世界上许多发展中国家的背景下，实验性治疗手段以不同的正义概念为基础，这些概念往往并存：惩罚性司法涉及国家的强制性权力，恢复性司法涉及传统权威和围绕修复社区的根深蒂固的社区规范。这使我们能够研究正式和非正式司法机构在建设强大国家方面的潜在互补性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project seeks to address a fundamental question of state formation: How can weak and fragile states become strong in the absence of the capacity to tax? We test one possible answer: providing justice and resolving disputes. While policymakers and economists have often focused on the power to tax, the historical record suggests that dispute resolution may provide a useful first step in building strong states that are able to deliver goods and services for their citizens. We will provide experimental evidence about how to build state capacity and legitimacy in fragile post-conflict settings as well as how different types of approaches to dispute resolution contribute to this goal. In particular, we examine the effectiveness of state and non-state approaches to justice provision. Examining these issues will advance knowledge in the fields of political economy and development economics, with key implications for welfare. Our collaboration with local government and an NGO strengthen the partnership between academia, civil society, and government and is itself a direct example of evidence-based policymaking.To this end, we examine the randomized rollout of a legal capacity building program implemented at scale in the target city by the Ministry of Justice and a local NGO. This program has (1) a “punitive” legal capacity building arm in which state lawyers serve as neighborhood legal representatives with subsidized services, and (2) a “restorative” legal capacity building arm in which a neighborhood leader performs these same functions. Our goal is to empirically examine the effects of this program on property rights security, crime, violence, and citizens’ willingness to pay taxes for the formal state. Doing so will enhance our understanding of how strong states can emerge when the capacity to tax their citizens is low to begin with: by taking the legal – not fiscal – path to state capacity, i.e., providing greater access to justice and resolving disputes effectively and fairly. Furthermore, the experimental treatment arms are grounded in different notions of justice which, in the context of many developing countries around the world, often exist side by side: punitive justice involving the coercive power of the state and restorative justice involving traditional authorities and deep-seated community norms around mending the community. This allows us to examine potential complementarities between formal and informal institutions of justice in building strong states.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.