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Public Choice

Erschienen in:

09.03.2017

Can extreme rainfall trigger democratic change? The role of flood-induced corruption

verfasst von: Muhammad Habibur Rahman, Nejat Anbarci, Prasad Sankar Bhattacharya, Mehmet Ali Ulubaşoğlu

Erschienen in: Public Choice | Ausgabe 3-4/2017

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Abstract

Using a new dataset of extreme rainfall covering 130 countries from 1979 to 2009, this paper investigates whether and how extreme rainfall-driven flooding affects democratic conditions. Our key finding indicates that extreme rainfall-induced flooding exerts two opposing effects on democracy. On one hand, flooding leads to corruption in the chains of emergency relief distribution and other post-disaster assistance, which in turn impels the citizenry to demand more democracy. On the other hand, flooding induces autocratic tendencies in incumbent regimes because efficient post-disaster management with no dissent, chaos or plunder might require government to undertake repressive actions. The net estimated effect is an improvement in democratic conditions.

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On a related, but nevertheless distinct topic, Sobel and Leeson (2006), Schultz and Libman (2015) and Escaleras and Register (2012) show how decentralized political institutions and local knowledge contribute to government effectiveness in responding to natural disasters.

A well-known historical example is the severe 1970 flooding in Eastern Pakistan, which acted as a catalyst for Bangladesh’s Liberation War in 1971.

Earlier evidence on the public reaction against corruption is provided by Peters and Welch (1980), who show that corruption charges against candidates reduce the votes these candidates receive in US congressional elections by 6–11%. See also Welch and Hibbing (1997).

Escaleras et al. (2007) show that in countries with more corruption, earthquakes are more deadly.

The off-equilibrium prediction of the model is that rampant corruption in the flood year is followed by less democracy in the subsequent year, but then the regime faces an insurgency. The model also implies that preventing corruption after flooding events can go hand in hand with autocracy off-the-equilbrium.

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The contemporary hydrology literature demonstrates the relationship between runoff and flood severity. See Sui and Koehler (2001) and Cunderlik and Burn (2002).

The correlation between our measure and alternative data sources such as the National Center for Environment Prediction and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization agro-climatic database exceeds 0.8.

Adopting the standard deviation of monthly total rainfall in a given year for each 2.5° node to measure extreme rainfall yields qualitatively similar findings.

Our results remain qualitatively similar using the 95th, 85th, 80th and 75th percentile thresholds.

For example, Makkah Province in Saudi Arabia faces severe seasonal flash floods notwithstanding that it is situated in an arid area characterized by high temperatures and low rainfall.

The exclusion of smaller countries, such as country C in Fig. 2, is unlikely to affect our results, as we employ a large panel of 130 countries and capture extreme rainfall variations on a small-scale interval, i.e., 2.5° × 2.5°.

See Starr (1991), Starr and Lindborg (2003) and Leeson and Dean (2009).

Our sample indicates that 25% of flooding events around the world during the 1979–2009 period affected at least 1% or more of a country’s population, on average.

We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for having revealed to us the lags in the timing of variables and their potential implications.

We take the natural log of the per capita agricultural output to maintain the underlying data distribution uniformly symmetric.

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Titel: Can extreme rainfall trigger democratic change? The role of flood-induced corruption
verfasst von: Muhammad Habibur Rahman
Nejat Anbarci
Prasad Sankar Bhattacharya
Mehmet Ali Ulubaşoğlu
Publikationsdatum: 09.03.2017
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Public Choice / Ausgabe 3-4/2017
Print ISSN: 0048-5829
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7101
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-017-0440-1

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