IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/wdevel/v183y2024ics0305750x24002213.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Climate shocks, regional favoritism and trust in leaders: Insights from droughts in Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Ahlerup, Pelle
  • Sundström, Aksel
  • Jagers, Sverker C.
  • Sjöstedt, Martin

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Ahlerup, Pelle & Sundström, Aksel & Jagers, Sverker C. & Sjöstedt, Martin, 2024. "Climate shocks, regional favoritism and trust in leaders: Insights from droughts in Africa," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 183(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:183:y:2024:i:c:s0305750x24002213
    DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106751
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X24002213
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106751?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:183:y:2024:i:c:s0305750x24002213. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.