Political Institutions and Rebounds from Climate Disasters

• In Event: Navigating the Nexus: Governance, Tech, & Infrastructure in Crisis Management

Abstract

Extreme weather events (floods, storms, droughts, etc.) can lead to growth declines if not mitigated by the appropriate policy response. It is thus essential to understand how political institutions can affect the policies chosen by governments that may increase the likelihood of successful rebounds following a shock. While there is a robust literature on the impact of climate change on political stability, scholars have yet to investigate how political institutions affect governments’ responses to climate shocks. I fill this gap by examining how measures of accountability, constraints on the executive, democracy, and other measures associated with democratic regimes impact a country’s response to extreme weather events. Empirically, I employ a difference-in-difference model to investigate changes of growth around extreme weather events, interacting this with institutional measures of accountability, constraints on the executive, etc. Preliminary results indicate that countries with smaller winning coalition sizes (Bueno de Mesquita et. al. 2003) do not witness growth rebounds following an extreme weather event, while countries with larger coalition sizes do. Analyses of other institutional measures do not provide such a sharp result, suggesting that low winning coalition countries (such as military regimes and one-party states) – theorized to prioritize the provision of private goods to supporters over public goods – are distinct in their poor responses to climate disasters.

Author

• Ernest Sergenti, World Bank