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The Comparative Politics of Natural Disasters
Type
fundamental research project
Start Date
01 September 2012
End Date
31 August 2016
Status
ongoing
Keywords
Democracy
elections
policy
natural disasters
environmental risks
voter behavior
economic voting
Description
Natural disasters cause economic destruction, environmental damage, and often a large number of human casualties. The scientific community largely agrees that climate change will likely increase the frequency and severity of natural disasters in the future. The proposed research project explores two core aspects of the politics of natural disasters: the political determinants of disaster relief allocation and the temporal as well as spatial effects of relief spending on elections. It relates to literatures in comparative politics, political economy, electoral behavior, and the environmental sciences. The cross-country comparative perspective of this project will for the first time allow for studying political biases in disaster relief allocation, the moderating effects of political institutions on disaster policies, and their electoral consequences within a unified framework. With respect to methodology, the project will apply causal inference methods to GIS-referenced data that exploits disasters as natural experiments. Since disasters constitute events that are exogenous to political processes, the results of this research project promise to shed light on and generate important, policy-relevant insights into the political effects of disasters and the role of political factors for responses to natural hazards that are of interest to the social and the natural sciences as well as to society more generally.
Leader contributor(s)
Funder(s)
Topic(s)
Political science
comparative politics
political behavior
environmental sciences
Method(s)
Quantitative methods
causal inference
Range
Institute/School
Range (De)
Institut/School
Principal
Swiss National Science Foundation
Division(s)
Eprints ID
222437
2 results
Now showing
1 - 2 of 2
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PublicationPublic Goods and the Causal Effect of Expected Cooperation in Representative Samples( 2015-07-03)When do societies succeed or fail to provide public goods? Previous research emphasizes that cooperation in public goods games correlates with expectations about cooperation by others among students and other selected demographic subgroups. So far, however, we lack knowledge about whether this reciprocity effect is causal and a general feature of populations. We fielded large-scale representative surveys (N=8,500) in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States that included a public goods game in combination with a novel randomized experiment and a survey instrument eliciting individual's conditional contribution schedules. We find that higher expected cooperation by others causes a significant increase in individual contributions. We also find that positive reciprocity is much more widespread among richer, younger and more educated respondents. Therefore, socio-demographic characteristics matter for understanding behavior in social dilemmas because of their association with social norms of conditional cooperation.Type: conference paper
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PublicationHow Lasting Is Voter Gratitude? An Analysis of the Short- and Long-term Electoral Returns to Beneficial PolicyDominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightedness may obstruct the welfare-improving effect of democratic accountability. However, we know little about how long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies. We exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster, the 2002 Elbe flooding in Germany, to provide an upper bound for the short- and long-term electoral returns to targeted policy benefits. We estimate that the flood response increased vote shares for the incumbent party by 7 percentage points in affected areas in the 2002 election. Twenty-five percent of this short-term reward carried over to the 2005 election before the gains vanished in the 2009 election. We conclude that, given favorable circumstances, policy makers can generate voter gratitude that persists longer than scholarship has acknowledged so far, and elaborate on the implications for theories of electoral behavior, democratic accountability, and public policyType: journal articleJournal: ajps American Journal of Political ScienceVolume: 55Issue: 4
Scopus© Citations 228