Growing evidence warns about the detrimental effects of the stress induced by natural disasters on learning outcomes. Yet less is known about how political leadership could mitigate the adverse exposure to these events. Exploiting a natural experiment—the massive 2010 earthquake in Chile—as an exogenous shock and using fine-grained student data, we find that school disruption has a short and long-term impact on students’ test scores. Moreover, our results indicate that learning losses were more pronounced in municipalities with a first-term mayor, in contrast to a nonsignificant effect in municipalities with a reelected one. We show that one of the pathways accounting for these effects is the ability of experienced bureaucrats to mobilize educational resources, highlighting the relevance of managerial capacities in times of crisis.
Authors
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.1.08
- ISBN
- 2377-8253 2377-8261
- Published in
- United States of America
- Rights
- © 2024 Russell Sage Foundation. Alcaino, Manuel, and Pablo Argote. 2024. “Politics Matter: How Political Experience Mitigates Learning Losses Caused by Natural Disasters.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10(1): 181–204. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2024.10.1.08. We are grateful to Florencia Torche, Jennie Brand, Jason Fletcher, three anonymous reviewers, and the attendants of the “Disparate Effects of Disruptive Events on Children” conference for their very helpful comments. Direct correspondence to: Manuel Alcaino, at mj.alcaino-izquierdo@unesco.org; Pablo Argote, at pablo.argotetironi@usc.edu, Department Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California, United States.