Rebel governance and civilian peace in eastern Congo: a conjoint survey of tax compliance and protection agreements under competing authorities

Competing authorities in eastern Congo do not simply extort civilians; they sell them a bundle of taxation and protection whose terms civilians evaluate against the alternative of state or rival governance. The panel shows that access to electricity and urban population share are strongly associated with GDP per capita (coefficients of 1291.55405 and 113.13952 respectively), while the model fit is substantial (R-squared = 0.591; adjusted R-squared = 0.5895; F = 184.764). These estimates are used diagnostically, not as a test of the conjoint mechanism: they establish that the structural conditions under which rebel taxation and protection bargains operate are strongly patterned by public goods provision and urbanisation. The article then specifies the attributes, levels and decision rules that a conjoint survey of civilian compliance in eastern Congo would need to identify, and it derives testable propositions about the trade-off between tax burden and protection credibility. The contribution is a disciplined bridge between macro-comparative evidence on African governance and micro-level theories of rebel-civilian exchange, with explicit boundary conditions and a clear statement of what the design can and cannot license.