Natural Disasters and the Potential for Democratization

• In Event: Advances in Expert-Coded Data

Abstract

As climate change makes natural disasters more frequent (IPCC 2021), studying the impact of natural disasters on political and social processes becomes more and more important. In this paper, we investigate whether natural disasters have a potential to influence democratization. Most previous research has found positive associations between natural disaster occurrence and short-term increases in democracy scores. A major shortcoming in these studies is that they do not disentangle which political processes are vulnerable to the influence of natural disasters and therefore we know little about how exactly natural disasters may spur the regime change. In this paper we take an exploratory approach and test whether various democratic institutions - media freedom, freedom of organization, the extent of civil society participation, and the strength of political competition – change in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters. We use time-series cross country data from the EM-DAT database on the occurrence of natural disasters around the globe and Varieties of Democracy data on various aspects of democracy. Our sample covers 155 countries over 1950-2018. The results show that disaster occurrence is associated with a short-term increase in the strength of democratic institutions related to media freedom, freedom of organization, the extent of civil society participation, but less so with the strength of political competition. We do not find any long-term effect of natural disasters, which implies that external shocks in themselves do not guarantee a road towards democratization, but only open up a short window of opportunity, which is up to the political actors to utilize.

Authors

• Oskar Rydén

• Marina Povitkina, University of Oslo

• Sverker C. Jagers, University of Gothenburg

• Martin Sjöstedt, University of Gothenburg