Governing Natural Disaster: State Capacity, Democracy and Human Vulnerability

The paper discusses how state capacity and democracy interact in affecting human vulnerability of natural disasters. For rule and revenue, political elites have the incentive to build up relevant state capacity preventing disaster impacts on the population and property. The incentive of the elites and the capacity protecting citizens shall be stronger under democratic competitive elections. Thus, strong state capacity effectively reduces human vulnerability especially in democracy. A panel data of 150 countries from 1995 to 2009 are used to illustrate the relationship between state capacity, democracy, and the impact of disaster. The empirical findings from the multilevel models imply that strong state and democracy are associated with the lower disaster death and victim tolls.