Political consequences of natural disasters: accidental democratization?

As the consequences of climate change become stronger, the question of how this affects politics becomes more important. In this paper, we investigate the effect of natural disasters, which are increasing in frequency and intensity, on core democratic institutions - free and fair elections, political competition, civil society participation, and freedom of expression. While most studies find a positive association between natural disasters and democratization, they do not specify exactly which political processes disasters trigger. We use disaster data from EM-DAT and data on democratic institutions from V-Dem to investigate whether disasters can bring political changes conducive to democracy on a sample of 170 countries over 1960-2019. Our results show that a country experiencing a natural disaster also experiences improvements in freedom of expression, civil society participation, and some aspects of political competition - but only in the short term. This indicates that disasters open a window of opportunity for democratization, but societies need to react to secure this trend.