Coups and Social Trust

• In Event: Coups, Violence, Legitimacy and Trust

Abstract

How do coups affect social trust? Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the prevalence of coups, in particular across West Africa. Although significant attention has been paid to the effects of conflict and other forms of political violence on social trust, to date very little research has considered how social trust is affected by coups. As a distinctive form of intra-elite conflict, there are good reasons to think that the impact of coups on trust will differ from that of other forms of political violence. Building on insights from work in social psychology, we conceptualise trust as a rational adaptive response to vulnerability. Coups represent moments of violent competition for power between elites that create uncertainty about the state as a provider of security and essential services. Consequently, we argue that social trust will increase in response to coups, as a means of offsetting this uncertainty and insecurity. Analysis of cross-national data from the Afrobarometer series provide initial support for the expectation of a positive relationship between coup exposure and social trust. We then exploit a natural experiment to better identify the causal effect of coups on social trust in Burkina Faso. This provides robust evidence that coups increase social trust, and further analysis supports the proposed mechanism that increased social trust is a response to uncertainty and insecurity.

Authors

• Thomas James Brailey, University of Oxford

• Robin Harding, University of Oxford

• Thomas Isbell