Borrowed Authority: How Institutional Accountability Reconfigures Follower Legitimacy and Representative Drift

Formal institutions increasingly rely on locally embedded actors where trust and local credibility are central to service access. Yet institutional recognition creates a dual-audience authority problem: institutions can authorize a helper, but followers still decide whether that actor remains a legitimate representative of their interests. We develop a model of borrowed authority in which the relational consequences of institutional authorization depend on the salience of accountability to the authorizing institution. Using three-wave survey data from 287 individuals in recovery-support networks in Ghana, we find that accountability salience weakens the positive association between authorization and follower-conferred legitimacy and makes the authorization–representative-drift relationship increasingly positive, with a clearly positive association at high accountability. Bootstrapped conditional indirect associations show that the authorization–legitimacy–trust pathway to Social Recovery Capital remains positive but weakens as accountability rises, whereas the authorization–drift–trust pathway becomes negative at high accountability. The net focal serial association becomes progressively less positive rather than reliably negative. These patterns held under narrower measures and alternative path orderings, as well as across helper types and education levels. These findings position institutionalization as a problem of translating authority across audiences: external standing remains relationally valuable insofar as followers continue to perceive the authorized actor as aligned with them.