SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Political leadership in fragile states is often comprised of a combination of informal power brokers and technocratic elites. However, few studies to date have sought to quantify how these political orders correspond to public leadership preferences or which typologies of leadership are most conducive to consolidating state legitimacy. This paper uses experimental conjoint analysis to estimate leadership preferences in three provinces in northern Afghanistan. Contrary to what is widely assumed, the findings suggest that Afghans living in this region prefer leaders who are younger, highly educated, and who share the same ethnicity, while older leaders with religious education are penalized. These preferences hold across different age and income groups. Experimental treatments testing the effect of exposure to insecurity and corruption on leadership preferences had trivial effects on these preferences.