Political Trust, Shocks, and Accountability: Quasi-experimental Evidence from a Rebel Attack

• Author: Scott Gates,Mogens K. Justesen
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002720906446
• Date: 01 October 2020
• Published date: 01 October 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Trust, Shocks,

and Accountability:

Quasi-experimental

Evidence from a Rebel

Attack

Scott Gates

1,2

, and Mogens K. Justesen

3

Abstract

How does armed conflict affect accountability and political trust in democratic

governments?To answer this question,we present quasi-experimental evidencebased

on survey data which, coincidentally, were collected inthe days surrounding an unan-

ticipatedviolent attackby a rebelgroup in Mali. The chance occurrenceof the attack five

days into the survey demarcates respondents into two groups surveyed before and

after the attackand allows us to examine how the attackaffected approval of politicians

and trust in political institutions. Our results show that people mainly attribute

responsibilityto the president andnot to parliament or local government,while trust in

institutions is largely unaffected. We also show that these effects are strongest in the

region of theattack. These findings suggestthat voters in new democraciesare capable

of attributingresponsibility to individual politicians and governmentswhile maintaining

trust in the fundamental political institutions of democracy.

Keywords

civil wars, conflict, democrati c institutions, domestic politics, Africa, Insurgency,

quasi experiment, public opinion

1

Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Oslo, Norway

2

University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

3

Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

Corresponding Author:

Mogens K. Justesen, Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 24A, Frederiksberg DK-2000,

Denmark.

Email: mkj.egb@cbs.dk

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2020, Vol. 64(9) 1693-1723

ªThe Author(s) 2020

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022002720906446

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

A fundamental tenant of democracy is that politicians are held accountable to the

public. Schmitter and Karl (1991) go so far as to define modern political democracy

as “a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in

the public realm by citizens acting indirectly through the competition and cooper-

ation of their elected representatives” (p. 76). When things go wrong, elected leaders

will be punished, and the politicians deemed to be responsible will be kicked out of

office in the next election.

Antecedent to accountability is institutional trust, which can be defined as “a

summary judgement that the system is responsive and will do what is right even in

the absence of constant scrutiny” (Miller and Listhaug 1990, 358). Accountability

inherently depends on trust in the political system and the institutions that constitute

it. Yet, the two notions are clearly distinct. Accountability refers to individual

political actors, while institutional trust regards political institutions or the system

as a whole. In this sense, the difference between accountability and institutional trust

is related to Easton’s (1975) distinction between diffuse support toward the political

regime and specific supports toward its political leaders and the policies they pro-

duce. In a fragile democracy, this distinction has profound implications. A loss of

trust in democratic institutions while maintaining trust in an individual politician is

an invitation to undercut the institutional foundations of democracy and vest increas-

ing authority in the hands of a single leader. Alternatively, a loss of trust in demo-

cratic institutions can spur polarization and social conflict (Carlin et al. 2014b).

Voters may trust the fundamental p olitical institutions of the syste m while still

punishing individual politicians for their failures.

While voters should, in principle, be able to hold politicians accountable in the

face of adverse shocks or policy failures, sometimes it may be difficult to assess who

is responsible. One response is for the general public to blame all elected officials.

Indeed, Achen and Bartels (2004) show that the electorate tends to punish incum-

bents who preside over shocks of any variety—even those events a politician simply

could not control.

1

Another response is for the public to attribute re sponsibility

differentially between distinct political actors and institutions (Powell and Whit-

ten 1993; Duch and Stevenson 2008; Carlin et al. 2014b; Carlin et al. 2015). For

instance, Arcenaux and Stein (2006) find that residents who were more directly

affected by a disaster were more apt to blame local governmental officials and

not those at the national level, suggesting that voters often view particular

issues—even national ones—through “a local political lens” (Gartner and Segura

2008, 95).

Yet, to assess who voters hold accountable for an adverse shock, a fundamental

research problem must be overcome. The characteristics that affect the likelihood of

experiencing an unanticipated shock may also affect attitudes toward leaders sitting

in elected positions. To treat an event as an exogenous shock, it must be orthogonal

to observable and unobservable variables that could otherwise confound the rela-

tionship between the shock and public opinion. In this article, we tackle this problem

by using quasi-experimental evidence from a survey in the West African country

1694 Journal of Conflict Resolution 64(9)