The Comparative Politics of Natural Disasters

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.