Disasters and Leaders’ Political Survival

• In Event: Disaster & Dictatorship: COVID-19 and Beyond

Abstract

How do disasters affect leaders’ political survival? As the world lives through the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst biological disaster in recent memory, one can casually observe certain political repercussions of the disaster. Most notably, the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic by the Trump administration was one of the direct causes of Trump’s loss in the 2020 US presidential election.

Despite its practical importance, there are surprisingly few studies exploring the link between disasters and their political consequences. Those few existing studies demonstrate that natural disasters increase domestic political instability, causing more frequent social unrests and violent civil conflicts (Brancati 2007; Drury and Olson 1998; Nel and Righarts 2008; Omelicheva 2011).

Building on existing studies, this paper attempts to provide more nuanced theoretical arguments on how disasters affect political survival of leaders, then empirically test the arguments. In doing so, it disaggregates disasters into natural and technological ones and theorize how governments’ handling of each type of disasters provides a cue about governments’ overall competency. In autocratic regimes where governments enjoy informational advantage, the opportunity for the public to evaluate governments’ competency is limited and leaders can utilize various measures to cope with disasters, often dubbed as “emergency measures,” to suppress domestic opposition, thus autocratic leaders can strengthen their grip on power following disasters. In democracies, natural disasters outside of humans’ control do not directly produce political consequences, but governments’ handlings of them do. In addition, manmade technological disasters provide opportunities for the public to reassess governments’ competency. Thus, leaders in democratic countries with larger casualties from disasters are likely to experience leadership turnovers. Using the international disaster database (EM-Dat) and datasets on political regimes, we show that disasters help autocratic leaders’ political survival yet hurt democratic leaders’ political survival.

Authors

• Chungshik Moon, Chung-Ang University

• Byungwon Woo, Yonsei University