How do disruptions in basic public service delivery shape people's perceptions of politicians and government? We offer new evidence on this question from the July 2012 blackout in India, the largest in human history. Using data from the second round of the India Human Development Survey, we compare confidence in politicians between households that were surveyed during the outage (treatment) and only days before it (control). Balance statistics show that the treatment and control groups are statistically indistinguishable, and further tests indicate that there was no disturbance to the pattern of surveying because of the outage. We find that, far from undermining public confidence in politicians, the outage increased it, as citizens reacted to the anxiety and fear created by the crisis. The results cannot be explained by attribution error, as people's confidence in irrelevant actors and institutions remains unchanged. Analysis of other survey data provides evidence for external validity. These results have troubling normative implications because they suggest that politicians reap benefits from disruptions in public service delivery, and therefore may have limited incentive to adopt measures to prevent such disruptions.

中文翻译：

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电击：2012 年印度大停电和公众对政客的信心

基本公共服务提供的中断如何影响人们对政治家和政府的看法？我们从 2012 年 7 月印度发生的人类历史上最大的停电事件中提供了关于这个问题的新证据。使用来自第二轮印度人类发展调查的数据，我们比较了在停电期间（治疗）和停电前几天（控制）接受调查的家庭对政治家的信心。平衡统计表明，处理组和对照组在统计上无法区分，进一步的测试表明没有因停电而干扰调查模式。我们发现，停电不仅没有削弱公众对政治家的信心，反而增加了信心，因为公民对危机造成的焦虑和恐惧做出了反应。结果不能用归因错误来解释，因为人们对无关行为者和机构的信心保持不变。对其他调查数据的分析为外部有效性提供了证据。这些结果具有令人不安的规范意义，因为它们表明政治家从公共服务提供的中断中获益，因此可能没有动力采取措施防止此类中断。