Browsing by Author "Jagers, Sverker C"

Filter results by typing the first few letters
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Drought and Political Trust
    (University of Gothenburg, 2023-04) Ahlerup, Pelle; Sundström, Aksel; Jagers, Sverker C; Sjöstedt, Martin; Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg
    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.