 Climate shocks, regional favoritism and trust in leaders: Insights from droughts in AfricaPelle Ahlerup, Aksel Sundström, Sverker C. Jagers and Martin Sjöstedt World Development, 2024, vol. 183, issue C Abstract: Droughts can affect people’s trust in political leaders positively, through rallying effects, or negatively, through blame attribution. We examine how drought conditions affect trust in leaders 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 in leaders 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. Keywords: Africa; Drought; Afrobarometer; Political trust; Climate change; Disasters (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:183:y:2024:i:c:s0305750x24002213 DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106751 Access Statistics for this article World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes More articles in World Development from Elsevier |
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