Politics of natural disaster

Abstract

This dissertation is about major natural disasters, and how they contribute to legitimacy crises of governments. Three major factors explain the emergence of a legitimacy crisis in a post-disaster context: the frequency of disaster occurrence, the quality of the government response to disasters, and the type of regime within which the government operates. Employing a large-N statistical analysis of data on major natural disasters and anti-government domestic political activities for the years between 1990-2010, I show that higher counts of disasters, as a rule, increase the risks of anti-government demonstrations, revolutions, riots, guerrilla warfare, and intrastate conflict. The disaster-political opposition relationship is conditional upon the characteristics of political regimes. No regime is entirely free from the political dangers of disasters. Consolidated autocracies and well established democracies are less likely than mixed regimes to observe political crises in the context of a higher frequency of natural disasters. To evaluate the quality of government response and how it mediates the disaster-legitimacy relationship, I conduct a qualitative analysis of news reports on four major disaster events in South Asia – cyclone Sidr of 2007 and cyclone Aila of 2009 in Bangladesh and cyclone Aila and the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 in India. The case studies reveal that poor preparedness, and inadequate immediate and long-term response of a government invite public criticism of the incumbent, antigovernment protest movements, and anti-incumbent voting in elections. When opposition parties translate this public frustration into broader political mobilization, the