Disease, Disaster, and Disengagement: Ebola and Political Participation in Sierra Leone
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Disease, Disaster, and Disengagement: Ebola and Political Participation in Sierra Leone Benjamin Crisman 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract How do widespread public health crises affect political behavior? This article examines the impact of the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak on political participation in Sierra Leone. In addition to the effects observed following conflict and natural disasters, I present evidence that hardship brought on by the outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) substantially decreased participation in civic affairs, measured in self-reported political activity using data from an Afrobarometer survey conducted near the end of the outbreak. To account for selection and endogeneity concerns, I undertake falsification and coefficient stability approaches in addition to controlling for levels of political activity in the 2012 national election. The negative effect seems driven in part by a reduction in trust and perceived performance of traditional institutions and not from an increase in economic insecurity, highlighting the role of external efficacy rather than resource-based mechanisms in mediating the relationship between exposure to the disease and participation. Keywords Ebola . Political participation . Civic engagement . External efficacy
Introduction How do widespread public health crises affect individual attitudes and political behavior? Infectious diseases are ubiquitous in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and the intensity and frequency of outbreaks are increasing (Smith et al. 2014) and expected to continue to increase in the face of climate change (Altizer et al. 2013), rising antibacterial resistance (Jones et al. 2008), and deforestation (Wolfe at al. 2005). In the case of This draft: December 12, 2019 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-02009300-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Benjamin Crisman [email protected]
1
Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Studies in Comparative International Development
Ebola virus disease (EVD), these outbreaks are becoming more deadly (Diehl et al. 2016). While the negative consequences of persistent disease burden on economic outcomes are well known, as in the case of malaria (Sachs & Malaney 2002) or HIV/ AIDS (Whiteside 2002), the consequences of disease crises on political development are less clear. In this article, I explore the relationship between Ebola exposure in the West African Ebola outbreak and civic participation using individual responses from Afrobarometer Round 6 (2015) survey data in Sierra Leone. This work joins a growing body of literature examining the consequences of exposure to large-scale crises and traumatic events on political participation, collective action, cooperation, and a variety of prosocial preferences. The majority of this literature identifies a consistent, positive, and arguably causal link between the two. In a r
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