Drought and Political Trust
Abstract
Droughts can affect people’s political trust positively, through rallying effects, or negatively, through blame attribution. We examine how drought conditions affect political trust in the context of Africa. We link high-precision exogenous climate data to survey respondents, 2002–2018, and report moderate negative effects of drought conditions on people’s trust in their president. These negative effects increase with the severity of drought conditions. The political economy of favoritism, where some regions are preferentially treated by rulers, should result in heterogeneous effects across territories. We find that trust increases in capital regions and in leader birth regions during dry conditions. In contrast, when droughts take place in such regions, trust levels fall in other regions. This is in line with the idea that capital regions and leader birth regions could be preferentially treated in the aftermath of droughts. Understanding these processes further is important given their salience because of global warming.
Publisher
University of Gothenburg
Other description
JEL codes: H70, O10, D74
Collections
View/ Open
Date
2023-04Author
Ahlerup, Pelle
Sundström, Aksel
Jagers, Sverker C
Sjöstedt, Martin
Keywords
Africa
Drought
Trust
Climate change
Disasters
Publication type
report
ISSN
1403-2465
Series/Report no.
Working Papers in Economics
832
Language
eng