Collective Beliefs on Global Poverty

Abstract

This chapter contends that a significant way of understanding a campaign’s effect on the public is to look at its influence on collective beliefs associated with the campaign’s issues. A key goal of Make Poverty History was ‘[t]o engage and educate the public in poverty and development issues in an unprecedented way’.¹ Years of research by academics, the UK government and NGOs showed that the public had a limited and often stereotyped perception of the causes and consequences of poverty in developing contries, leading to a sense of disempowerment about what action they could take to make a difference. This will be my starting point for this chapter, which will look at how Make Poverty History affected long-term beliefs on global poverty among the UK public. I will draw mainly from the theory of collective beliefs as developed by Klandermans (1992).