Expected foreign military intervention and demand for state-building: evidence from Mali

We study the informational effects of foreign military intervention on citizens' motivations to participate in state-building processes. We analyze the 2012 United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized intervention in Mali to reunify the country and restore democracy during a profound institutional crisis. By exploiting the randomness of the foreign intervention announcement, relative to the timeline of the Afrobarometer interviews, we document that individuals interviewed the days after the announcement have a higher intrinsic motivation to comply with taxes, are less inclined to refuse to filing taxes, and are more reluctant to evade even if had chances, relative to individuals, interviewed immediately before, with the same characteristics, region, and ethnic group. We demonstrate that these effects are specific to regions characterized by low state capacity and limited ethnic diversity, as well as to individuals who perceive that their ethnic group has not been systematically discriminated against by the state. Consistently with our story, we document that motivations to comply only increase in respondents with access to the news at home (who own either a TV or a radio). Our results survive a wide range of falsification tests and indicate that foreign military interventions signal state-building, raising the expected benefits to participate.