Performance Legitimacy and Conflict in African Provinces

Several conflict studies explore material factors connected to state performance (e.g., growth and Gross Domestic Product per capita). Recently, georeferenced conflict research has linked local economic factors such as subnational wealth and intrastate inequality to conflict. However, few studies concern the people’s perceptions. More specifically, existing studies neglect the effect of performance legitimacy, understood as the people’s evaluations of presidential performance. This study argues that systematic focus on subnational variation of presidential performance legitimacy contributes to a deeper understanding of conflict occurrence. This is because objective indicators of performance such as economic wealth differ from actual perceptions of performance. The hypothesis is investigated with survey data from the Afrobarometer rounds 2–5 covering thirty-four countries and 376 first-order administrative units. These data are merged with georeferenced data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) and the Peace Research Institute Oslo-Grid dataset (PRIO-GRID). The results show that high levels of performance legitimacy in a province decrease the expected number of conflict events the following year. Future conflict studies should therefore include perceptions on a substate level.