Does drought exposure erode trust in the political system in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Abstract

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of severe droughts. As water scarcity can destroy vital resources such as crops and livestock, droughts pose major challenges to affected societies. Concerns arise that the resulting hardship and suffering could exacerbate social tensions. Trust in the political system, defined as citizens’ overall confidence in the state to deliver satisfactory outcomes, is an integral foundation of stable state-society relations. To illuminate under what conditions droughts might exert a destabilizing effect, investigating their impact on trust in the political system is paramount. Our study is the first to investigate how drought exposure influences citizens´ overall confidence in the political system. Previous research shows that citizens tend to lose trust when dissatisfied with the living conditions and output that a system provides. While droughts emerge gradually and, thus, give states multiple opportunities to intervene, states in the Global South often struggle to master the challenging task of drought management, thereby demonstrating inadequate, dissatisfactory state performance. We argue that failures in successful drought management showcase what goes wrong in a political system, which in turn leads to an erosion of trust in the political system. Using individual-level survey data from Afrobarometer round five, matched with high-resolution water scarcity data, our analysis reveals that recently drought-exposed individuals exhibit significantly lower levels of trust in the political system compared to their unaffected counterparts. This effect is most pronounced in sub-national regions with low state capacity, where the implementation of successful drought relief measures might be particularly difficult.