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Leader Survival and Natural Disasters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2012
Abstract
Analyses of the occurrence of natural disasters show that in large coalition systems, such as democracies, their occurrence has little effect on protest or leader survival. However, if large numbers of people die in these disasters, more protests occur and leader survival diminishes. In contrast, for leaders in small coalition systems, the occurrence of disasters increases protests and reduces tenure, but the level of fatalities has little effect. The anticipation of these potential political effects accounts for why many more people die in disasters in small coalition systems than in large coalition systems.
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Footnotes
Department of Government, University of Essex; Department of Politics, New York University (email: alastair.smith@nyu.edu). An online appendix with replication data, estimation routines and appendices is available at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JPS.
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