Over the last thirty years, decentralization has been a crucial component of public sector reforms in many developing countries, designed to transfer greater power to sub national levels of government and to provide a more effective oversight role to the people. Despite these arguments, little attention has been paid to empirically test under what

conditions decentralization reforms succeed in their stated objectives of enhancing popular trust for local authorities and strengthening government legitimacy. The paper addresses this gap by looking at the consequences of political decentralization in post-conflict Sierra Leone and examining the impact of decentralized service delivery on legitimating beliefs towards local governments and the consequences of these beliefs for quasi-voluntary compliance.

We use a unique longitudinal survey to estimate multi-level models which exploit variation over time and within and across sub-national units in Sierra Leone. Results suggest that the improvements in service delivery under conditions of decentralized governments are associated with greater trust in local government authorities Moreover, this impact is significantly higher for the most remote communities. We also nd that citizen’s trust in local government authorities is associated with greater participation in road cleaning, our indicator of quasi-voluntary compliance. The ndings are robust to control for alternate explanations and speak to the remarkable success of decentralization reforms in enhancing government legitimacy before ordinary citizens. The paper concludes by considering the policy implications of the findings for the design of international development programs in support of decentralization reforms in Sierra Leone, while also raising a number of interesting questions about the sources and consequences of trust in post-conflict and ethnically diverse states.