1.1 The Research Questions
Upon clenching the South African Presidency in April 2009, now ousted head of state Jacob Zuma placed crime at the center of his policy agenda and immediately called for the resurrection of street committees.1 Initially developed during apartheid to provide a measure of protection for black communities, street committees were described as South Africa’s “best formula to fight crime” by the new head of state.
Some interpreted Zuma’s call to restore street committees as a signal that the state continued to lack the capacity necessary to effectively decrease crime and, perhaps more importantly, assuage public fears about crime in the country. Others interpreted the new chief executive’s call as a move by the state to capitalize off of the legitimacy of these local-level non-state security actors. This project takes a fresh look at the relationship between legitimacy and capacity and, in so doing, helps to shed new light on a puzzle that persists within African politics, namely, how states remain legitimate in the eyes of their citizenry, when they are weak and underperforming. Importantly, the new pieces to this puzzle that are presented here make no reference to conventional explanations of ethnicity and patronage; rather, I argue that non-state actors attenuate the impact of weak state capacity on state legitimacy, under certain conditions.
While there is no consensus on the intent and implication of Zuma’s plea for street committees to get involved in crime fighting, it is clear that his invitation brought renewed national attention to the struggle the country continues to face with generating a widespread sense of personal safety and security. It also renewed public discourse on the persistence of state and societal reliance on non-state sources of security in the post-apartheid era. South Africa was successful in ushering in multi-party democracy in 1994 with the end of apartheid; however, the transition has not translated into greater levels of security; state institutions and wealthy individuals continue to contract with private security companies for protection, while the poor continue to rely on informal codes, conventions, and networks as a means to navigating insecure locales.
This book interrogates two questions related to everyday crime and security. The first explores the political consequences of non-state security provision. Specifically, it examines how citizens’ reliance on non-state security actors (such as commercial security companies, neighborhood watch groups, and community police forums) affects their perceptions of state legitimacy. In the context of South Africa, the key case that I examine in this book, 52% of survey respondents report turning to actors outside of state police for security.2 The second question looks more broadly at how citizens’ everyday security experiences shape their political attitudes and behavior. It assesses how feelings of personal insecurity and experiences of victimization weigh on individuals’ political views and participation. Both of these questions contribute to an important research agenda on non-state provision and the political significance of everyday crime, with important implications for state–society relations.
Across Africa, many ordinary citizens rely on non-state security provision.3 Non-state security structures such as street committees, neighborhood watches, and commercial security firms are seen as essential forces in combating crime and violence in this context. Yet for all the many calls for greater non-state provision of security, little is known about the consequences of the non-state provision of this key good.
1.2 Why Study the Political Consequences of Non-state Security?
1.2.1 The Philosophical Importance of Security Provision
From a political philosophy standpoint, social contract theorists such as Hobbes and Locke argue that states exist, by and large, to provide security. These theorists, and empirical political scientists alike, argue that the state’s provision of security provides the raison d’être of states, and therefore is critical to cementing the social contract between state and society. For empirical scholars who assess how citizens’ performance evaluations affect their perceptions of the state, the key question raised here is generally how the state’s ability (or lack thereof) to provide adequate protections for individuals shapes their attitudes toward the state (Bratton and Chang 2006; Rotberg 2003; Weingast 1997; Wood et al. 2006). Essentially, the emphasis is a state-centered one that focuses on whether and how well the state is able to provide this good. Yet, increasingly, citizens in both the developed and developing world extensively rely on non-state providers to meet their security needs. This raises a new and important question, one that focuses on the consequences of who provides. In a world where non-state actors from commercial firms to vigilante groups participate heavily in the provision of security, the question of who provides is as essentially political as the question of the quality of state-provided services. This book therefore probes the behavioral and attitudinal consequences of non-state security provision.
1.2.2 Public Goods and Political Legitimacy
There are a number of different ways that the state may boost perceptions of its legitimacy among the citizenry. Several scholars have distinguished between legitimacy or supportive attitudes that come from the provision of material goods, to ones that are derived from the way in which rules and procedures are upheld within a given society (Bratton and Mattes 2001; Diamond and Morlino 2004). Those who focus on procedurally based sources of legitimacy follow the path of Weber, emphasizing rational-legal notions of legitimacy and the importance of rule-based behavior. These works suggest that the development of rules that are perceived to be fair, as well as the fair and equal application of such rules, will lead to legitimating attitudes among the citizenry (Tyler 2003; Levi et al. 2009). Many works that examine procedurally based support of political institutions have focused on democracy, elections, and institutions of the state such as police forces and courts (Gibson and Caldeira 2003; Jackman 1993; Mondak 1993; Tyler and Fagan 2010).
Citizens’ faith in the state’s legitimacy may also come about from symbolic actions undertaken by the state. The purpose of these actions is to create affective linkages with citizens’ that cause them to identify with and lend credence to the political system. These bonds may be developed through processes of socialization and/or through experience with rituals and symbols that reinforce the “rightness” or “appropriateness” of state institutions. The types of affective bonds that matter for political legitimacy are ones like ethnicity and party identification, deeply held attachments that are not contingent on elected officials’ performance. Instead, this dimension of legitimacy is more about what the political institutions represent for individuals, symbolically (Easton 1957). When considering this dimension, it becomes possible to see how individuals may continue to see that state as legitimate, even when they are dissatisfied with the provision of material goods and unhappy with how political processes unfold.
More frequently, political scientists study the role that state-provided public goods and services play in boosting citizens’ support for the regime, government, and individual political leaders. We generally refer to this as the instrumental or performance-based dimension of legitimacy. The conventional wisdom has been that where the state is able to effectively provide public goods, its citizens will be more likely to see it as legitimate. This logic has been demonstrated in the literature on economic voting and voter turnout (Anderson 2000; Lewis-Beck and Paldam 2000; Powell and Whitten 1993), and in works that explore the impact of economic and political performance evaluations in spurring political...