To gauge the extent of political competition, we use the thick Freedom of Association Index, which measures the extent to which political parties are banned, barriers to forming a political party, whether oppositional parties have autonomy and independence from the ruling regime, whether the elections are multiparty, and repression of and control over entry and exit of civil society organizations. [...] To make our study comparable to others in the field, we also test the effect of natural disasters on the aggregate level of democracy, operationalizing it with the Electoral Democracy Index from V-Dem, which consists of indices measuring freedom of expression and access to alternative information, freedom of association, clean elections, elected officials, and suffrage extent. [...] To explore the differences between our results and the results by Lührmann and Rooney (2021) further, we performed an analysis with the declaration of the state of emergency for other reasons and the results varied. [...] We detected a negative effect of declaring a state of emergency on democratic institutions if the state of emergency was declared due to an armed conflict or mass protest, no effect from a declaration of a state of emergency due to terrorist attacks, and a positive 20 effect from a declaration of the state of emergency because of natural disasters on all aspects of democracy apart from the Elected. [...] The political ignorance of the central government towards the victims of this natural disaster led to dramatic effects in the following 1970 election, favoring the regionalist party “representing” the area that was most negatively affected 26 by the storm.
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- Pages
- 60
- Published in
- Sweden
Table of Contents
- WP_front page_wp148.pdf 1
- WP_148.pdf 2
- Abstract 4
- Introduction 5
- Previous Research 6
- Unnatural disasters 6
- Natural disasters and democracy 8
- Theory 9
- Natural disasters and electoral aspects of democracy 10
- Natural disasters and freedom to organize 11
- Political competition 11
- Civil society 12
- Natural disasters and freedom of expression 13
- Data and Method 14
- Dependent variables 14
- Independent variables 15
- Method 17
- Results 18
- Discussion 25
- Concluding Remarks 28
- References 29
- Appendix 1. Summary Statistics and Correlations 39
- Appendix 2. List of Countries Included in the Analysis 42
- Appendix 3. Analysis with Disaggregated Indicators 44
- 3.1. Natural disasters and electoral aspects of democracy 44
- 3.2.1. Political competition 48
- 3.2.2. Natural disasters and civil society participation 50
- Appendix 4. A Note on Long-term Effects of Natural Disasters. 55
- Appendix 5. Analysis with Aid as a Control Variable 57
