Natural Disaster and Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

Can natural disasters undermine democratic legitimacy? This article maps a causal pathway from natural disaster damage to shifts in opinion and behavioral tendencies in less established democracies. It theorizes citizens who suffer damage in such contexts will tend toward lower evaluations of democratic institutions, lower support for democratic values and practices, and stronger dispositions toward action. These expectations are tested with national survey data collected following Chile’s 2010 earthquake and tsunami by analyzing intracountry differences in damage with matching techniques and regression analyses. Results are consistent with expectations, with important implications for Chile and other less established democracies.

Keywords

public opinion democracy natural disaster matching Chile

Mass commitments to democratic institutions and processes curtail the ambitions of political leaders who might prefer to cross the democratic line (Diamond 1999; Linz and Stepan 1996). As recent events in Honduras, Paraguay, Peru, and Russia remind us, low legitimacy may signal to elites that the public seeks or will assent to the subversion of democratic rules (Carnaghan 2007; Seligson and Booth 2010; Seligson and Carrión 2002). Given this critical link between public opinion and stability in comparatively fragile democracies, it is important to consider the consequences that crises in those systems can have for levels of democratic commitment.

Early theorizing warned crises could overload the state with so many demands that it risked collapse (Almond and Verba 1963; Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975; Easton 1965; Huntington 1968). Later theorists exempted from this doomsday prediction well-established and robust democracies whose deep stocks of legitimacy made them impervious to episodic performance failures (Norris 1999; see also Bratton and Mattes 2001 and Diamond 1999). But in newer democracies, theory and evidence suggest crises can overwhelm states and erode legitimacy (Córdova and Seligson 2010; Cruz 2003; Graham and Sukhtankar 2004; Malone 2010; Merolla and Zechmeister 2009; Nel and Righarts 2008; Pérez 2003). In so doing, crises put newer democracies at risk not because “the public actively desires the return of old regimes” but rather because decaying democratic public opinion can spur polarizing and possibly violent political and social conflicts; embolden cavalier political leaders who disregard checks and balances or remove elected rivals by unconstitutional means; and/or, fuel public acquiescence to a “gradual erosion of political rights and civil liberties” (Norris 1999, 2).

We ask if natural disasters, as a type of crisis attributable to “nature, fate, or God” (Jennings 1999, 5), undermine support for democratic rules of the game. This issue is poorly understood. Most disaster research on long-standing democracies explores if and how victims hold incumbents accountable (Achen and Bartels 2004; Arceneaux and Stein 2006; Bechtel and Hainmueller 2011; Gasper and Reeves 2011; Healy and Malhotra 2009; Jennings 1999; Malhotra and Kuo 2008). With a few exceptions we note later, the focus in newer democracies has been on the public opinion implications of man-made (e.g., economic decline, crime waves) rather than natural crises. Thus, by assessing public opinion and natural disaster in a less established democratic setting, we extend scholarship on disasters and research on new democracies.

Our analyses use data on disaster damage, democratic attitudes, and participatory tendencies from an original national survey fielded within three months of the massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that struck Chile on February 27, 2010. The devastating pair of events displaced nearly one million Chileans, injured thousands, killed more than five hundred, and damaged three hundred and seventy thousand homes.¹ The dataset grants unique analytical leverage on the consequences of natural disasters for legitimacy and political behavior in newer democracies. Admittedly, our analysis provides just a snapshot of these consequences, but that snapshot is taken at a meaningful juncture: the initial stages of recovery and rebuilding efforts.

Chile is an ideal case study. While it has a fairly long democratic history, the country is still consolidating from its most recent authoritarian period (1973–1989). The legitimacy question is central to debates over Chilean democracy and breakdown (Valenzuela 1978). Though most saw the military’s ousting of Salvador Allende in 1973 as a temporary measure or a way to prevent dictatorial rule by Allende (Bermeo 2003, 166–168), a vocal minority supported the coup.² By 1988, a market-oriented economic model had earned Pinochet’s military regime enough legitimacy to garner 44 percent of the vote in a failed plebiscite on its existence. Nostalgia for that regime (Huneeus 2003) and conditional support for democracy (Carlin 2011) have persisted. In 2003, many Chileans doubted their democracy could withstand a major crisis.³ But a fine track record of economic growth, political stability, and alternation in power raised preferences for “democracy” to new heights (Corporación Latinobarómetro 2010). In addition, Chileans are accustomed and potentially desensitized to natural disasters. In the past century, Chile has had ten earthquakes of magnitude 8.0 or greater, including the strongest on record in 1960,⁴ and small tremors are felt regularly. Chile is, thus, an appropriate but relatively tough case for our argument. If a natural disaster can threaten legitimacy in a system like Chile—with its long democratic history, strong institutions, moderate levels of legitimacy, and high degrees of tectonic activity—disasters may have more pernicious effects in less robust democracies.

We propose a causal pathway by which natural disasters influence democratic public opinion in less established democracies. Specifically, we theorize that natural disasters will unleash criticism of incumbents, decreased support for democratic norms, and increased tendencies toward action. In assessing these expectations, we use original survey data from Chile on disaster damage, democratic support, and participatory tendencies, combined with matching and regression techniques. Matching takes advantage of variation in citizens’ disaster experiences while controlling for potentially confounding factors. While this marks an improvement over conventional regression analysis, it also has limitations that warrant a series of robustness tests.

We find disaster damage decreased victims’ specific support for municipal governments but also, and more worryingly, had negative externalities for broader democratic values and norms. Disaster victims were more supportive of military and executive coups, and less politically tolerant. Moreover, disaster experience raised participatory attitudes. While participation generally bolsters democracy, activists weakly committed to basic democratic processes and values could considerably stress the political system, a point we explore in the conclusion.

Natural Disasters and Democratic Legitimacy

Although exogenous to politics, natural disasters⁵ are “deeply and inherently political occasions” (Drury and Olson 1998). Citizens may blame them on “God,” “bad luck,” or other forces but often hold public policies and thus government responsible for mitigating disasters’ effects (e.g., Arceneaux and Stein 2006; Drury and Olson 1998; Jennings 1999). In this way natural disasters can influence public support for the political system (i.e., legitimacy). Political support spans from support for specific regime objects (e.g., national and municipal incumbents and policies) to more diffuse objects (e.g., political community, system, processes) (Booth and Seligson 2009; Easton 1965; Norris 1999). In systems for which democracy’s survival is rarely in doubt, scholars typically ask how natural disasters affect public attitudes toward incumbents and other state actors—that is, specific support. But where democracy is less sturdy, disasters might challenge the acceptance of basic democratic principles and values—that is, diffuse support.

Natural disasters from shark attacks, to drought, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes typically result in lower support for national and local incumbents (Achen and Bartels 2004; Arceneaux and Stein 2006; Healy and Malhotra 2010; Lay 2009). This general pattern of findings is consistent with the fundamental notion that adverse conditions hurt incumbents (Downs 1957; Fiorina 1981). However, other studies show incumbents can retain, and even gain, political support following a disaster (Abney and Hill 1966; Olson and Gawronski 2010; see also Drury and Olson 1998).⁶ In sum, natural disasters tend to have negative repercussions for incumbents, but lowered support for all actors and institutions is not a given.

In younger democracies, the political consequences of natural disasters may extend beyond specific support for incumbents for two reasons. First, they test a system’s capacity to protect and respond and, thus, may precipitate what Easton (1965, 58–59) terms demand input overload: a situation resulting from (1) volume stress, which connotes an increasing number of demands, and (2) content stress, or the complexity and novelty of those demands. As natural disasters elevate volume and content stress and tax the system’s response capabilities, “the overwhelming picture is one of system stress and public dissatisfaction with government” (Drury and Olson 1998, 155; see also Olson 2000 and Nel and Righarts 2008). Second, the political consequences of natural disasters may depend upon “pertinent aspects of the political culture” (Abney and Hill 1966, 975; see also Drury and Olson 1998; Pelling and Dill 2006), including the depth of political legitimacy. Indeed Abney and Hill (1966) reasoned a deep ex ante reserve of legitimacy mitigated political backlash against New Orleans’ incumbent mayor after Hurricane Betsy. But if legitimacy reserves are low or unstable, as in many new democracies, natural disasters may further erode it.

According to Easton (1965) and Lipset (1981), specific support and diffuse support are inherently linked. Sustained high performance builds a stock of specific support for political actors and policies that over time spills into and fills a “reservoir of good will” toward the general system, that is, diffuse support, which the political system can draw on if specific support drops temporarily. Research on Hurricane Katrina is telling: scholars investigated its consequences for specific support (e.g., incumbent approval, performance evaluations, vote choice, etc.), but none seriously questioned whether citizens—victims or otherwise—withdrew support from democratic institutions and processes more generally.⁷ Less established democracies, in contrast, have had less time to fill their reservoirs of diffuse support. Consequently, when crises hit and overwhelm these systems, they have less political legitimacy upon which to draw. So in places like Chile, where diffuse support is comparatively modest, a large-scale natural disaster could simultaneously drain specific and diffuse political support. This possibility constitutes our core set of expectations.

While disaster research in advanced democracies centers on incumbent blame, evaluations, and vote choice, research in other contexts emphasizes natural disasters’ potential to foment mass mobilization and action. Such behavior is more acute where the state lacks the time, capacity, or motivation for exhaustive recovery efforts. This blossoming of civic and other nongovernmental activity can range from neighborhood rescue and aid groups (Jalali 2002) to groups that catalyze public protest and even violent activities and conflict (Brancati 2007; Drury and Olson 1998; Gawronski and Olson 2013; Hsiang, Meng, and Cane 2011; Pelling and Dill 2010; Nel and Righarts 2008). In some postdisaster cases, civil society strengthens the social networks (Aldrich 2010) and therapeutic communities (Weil 2010) so critical for community rebuilding and resilience. In others, disasters mark a critical juncture in a longer path-dependent process of social and political change (Gawronski and Olson 2013; Olson and Gawronski 2003). As Weil (2010, 12) observes, “[O]ne of the most striking aspects of the post-Katrina period in New Orleans is how people who had never really taken part before have been drawn into civic affairs.” Because disaster victims are likely to reshape civil society, gauging their levels of political support is crucial to understanding the development of civil society in developing democracies.

This supplemental focus on participatory tendencies in the wake of a natural disaster is also of theoretical value as such behavior would provide a means by which mass attitudes might translate into political outcomes. If the disaster saps both forms of support and spurs participatory inclinations, then the democratic system faces an active and discontented citizenry, which is arguably more stressful from the perspective of democratic quality, and even stability, than low support alone. This is, in fact, what our analysis finds in the Chilean case.

Anticipating Public Responses to Natural Disaster in Chile

Deservedly or not, citizens often blame government for natural disaster damage. In fact, in authoritarian systems, natural disasters appear capable of draining regime legitimacy (Booth 1985; Camp 2007; Drury and Olson 1998). We suspect natural disasters have consequences similar in type, if not in scale, for less established democracies. Chile’s disaster provides a window through which to assess how disaster damage influences attitudes toward the political system and participation in a less established democracy.

Anticipating specific public responses to Chile’s February 27, 2010, earthquake and tsunami requires three basic considerations. First, should these events have had any discernible effect on political support? Jennings (1999) argues natural disasters may provoke comparatively weaker public reaction as people may see their prevention as lying beyond the means of mortal beings.⁸ However, citizens tend to blame government for poor preparation and/or poor response to natural disasters (Drury and Olson 1998; Olson and Gawronski 2010).⁹ In 2010, the Chilean public was outraged over casualties due to two flaws in state disaster preparedness systems. First, had the navy’s seismic information system pinpointed the earthquake’s epicenter under the ocean, instead of wrongly locating it under the mainland, it could have predicted the devastating tsunami that followed. Second, the government’s tsunami early warning system failed to alert vulnerable populations on the Juan Fernández Islands and along the coast of the mainland, leaving many in harm’s way. So while the government bore no responsibility for the seismic event itself, Chileans likely blamed government for at least some of its fatal consequences. Further militating against the null hypothesis is the salience of the disaster (Achen and Bartels 2004) overall and with respect to Chilean politics. It struck during President Michelle Bachelet’s lame-duck period and the aftermath extended into President Sebastián Piñera’s inaugural weeks in office.¹⁰ While such timing frustrated citizens’ attempt to identify which, if any, executive to blame, the political salience of the disaster likely heightened its effects on political attitudes in general. Specifically, both the transition of power to Piñera, the first elected president from the Right since 1958, and the public spat between Bachelet and military brass over sending troops to maintain order in the disaster zones arguably helped keep salient the democratic/authoritarian cleavage in Chilean politics (Bonilla et al. 2011; Torcal and Mainwaring 2003). Thus, we expect Chile’s earthquake and tsunami to have affected at least some dimensions of political support.

A second consideration relates to whose attitudes are most affected by natural disasters. While news coverage of the disaster in Chile was widespread, personally experiencing disaster is viscerally different than second-hand media accounts of it. Arceneaux and Stein (2006) find residents of the hardest-hit areas of the Houston 2001 flood were more likely than others to blame all levels of government. Likewise, Katrina victims or those who knew one allocated blame differently than their counterparts (Maestas et al. 2008). Forgette, King, and Dettrey (2008) largely attribute attitudinal differences between black and white residents of Katrina-affected areas to differences in living conditions. If direct experience most systematically influences one’s political evaluations in the wake of disasters, it is crucial to note that perceptions of personal experience may matter more than objective damage indicators. In this way, Lay’s (2009, 654) study of Hurricane Katrina finds, “those who perceived they were worse off were about 18 percent less likely to vote for Nagin.” Generally, we expect citizens who suffered more disaster damage to have different attitudes than those who sustained little or none.

A third consideration is how natural disasters affect victims. Based on our argument above,¹¹ we expect specific and diffuse indicators of support decayed among Chileans who suffered damage—at least during the initial stages of recovery, prior to substantial reconstruction efforts. As indicated earlier, we also expect suffering disaster damage to bolster participatory tendencies.

A Brief Portrait of the 2010 Chilean Earthquake and the Data

The February 27, 2010, earthquake and tsunami resulted in 521 deaths, 56 missing, more than 12,000 injuries, 370,000 houses damaged or destroyed, 800,000 displaced persons, and more than $30 billion in damages (Chilean Interior Ministry, U.S. Geological Survey [http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/nndc/]). Destruction occurred over 350 miles from the epicenter due to its magnitude and ensuing tsunami. Thus, even for a country with a long history of major quakes, the 2010 events were significant. Analysis of democratic attitudes in the near aftermath of such a disaster provides a sense of public mood prior to major government relief and reconstruction efforts that might otherwise confound our analysis.

Figure 1 graphs the scope of the disaster. The map on the left displays mean levels of self-reported damage to home and neighborhood (an index constructed with measures from the survey described below) by region. The map on the right documents estimated shaking intensity and wave heights with United States Geological Survey (USGS) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data.¹² Both maps show damage generally spread north and south from the epicenter and very roughly diffused as distance increased. They also, however, reveal that disaster damage varied across space due to differences in the heights of tsunami waves along the coast, in living conditions, and in shaking intensities. Thus, levels of damage are only partially related to proximity to the quake’s epicenter.

Figure 1.

Reported disaster damage levels by respondents, shaking intensity, and wave height.

We gauge the effects of disaster on democratic attitudes and participation with survey data from the 2010 AmericasBarometer study conducted under the direction of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and its partners at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. The survey is a national probability sample (n = 1,965) with face-to-face interviews fielded beginning just eight weeks after the disaster, from April 23 to June 10, 2010.¹³ This timing gives us a snapshot of public opinion at the outset of the recovery stage.¹⁴ According to the Chilean government, the period of emergency lasted until April 26 and focused on search and rescue, emergency shelters, and restoring basic necessities.¹⁵ Only a week prior to the launch of the survey, on April 16, the government announced a comprehensive national reconstruction plan with a March 2014 end date.¹⁶ Thus, analyses of these data provide perspective on how the public reacted in the disaster’s immediate aftermath, prior to substantial reconstruction and recovery.

We were fortunate to have input into the survey design. As major damage was dealt to Chile’s two largest cities—Concepción and Santiago—we oversampled a range of areas, including those that sustained less earthquake damage.¹⁷ Oversampling adds variation in the amount and type of damage respondents suffered and addresses the nonrandom nature of personal earthquake damage. As most of Chile is at high risk for earthquakes and because damage itself varied across space, the issue is not merely that certain locations are closer or farther from the epicenter; it is also that different foundations (bedrock, landfill, alluvial sediment) and different building methods (e.g., adobe) are more easily damaged and destroyed. In Santiago, for example, certain boroughs saw roads damaged, houses collapsed, and buildings in ruins while neighboring ones suffered little to no damage. In addition, coastal damage from the tsunami waves varied idiosyncratically due to the nature of the coastline and the location and construction of homes. Methodologically, oversampling broadens the pool of individual types, and thus increases the robustness of the matching approach described below.

Testing the Effects of Natural Disaster on Specific and Diffuse Support

Because we expect natural disaster damage to affect specific and diffuse forms of democratic support in Chile, we focus our analyses around the multidimensional concept of democratic political legitimacy rather than around support for “democracy” per se. Our reasons are twofold. First, individuals are likely to have firmer, more systematic opinions over actual democratic processes and institutions than democracy in the abstract (Mishler and Rose 1996). Evaluations of specific institutions and basic political processes are grounded in individuals’ day-to-day experiences under democratic governance, which Fiorina (1981, 5) famously noted, are the one “comparatively hard bit of data” they have. Second, the meanings that Latin Americans apply to the term democracy vary within and across countries (e.g., Camp 2001). We avoid entering into this semantic quagmire by using narrower and less abstract measures of individuals’ support for democratic institutions and the democratic rules of the game.

Our key indicator of specific support focuses on local government. Unlike congress and the president, municipal officers were elected to four-year terms in 2008. While Chile is not a federal system, local governments’ discretion over planning, traffic, urbanization, core aspects of education, and health policy means they play a palpable role in citizens’ lives. As urban planners, local incumbents are on the front lines of government blame for the disaster. Zoning rules and building code enforcement could be viewed as a determinant of the integrity, or collapse, of buildings and houses during the quake and flooding. Hence, if disaster damage affected support for specific institutions or incumbents in Chile, we should detect it vis-à-vis local government.¹⁸ We operationalize support for local government as an additive scale based on two questions tapping institutional performance and trust (range: 0–1, coded so that higher values indicate better evaluations).¹⁹ The results are unchanged if we examine the two questions separately.

Another potential measure of specific support is presidential approval. Though the president is Chile’s most visible political actor, the earthquake’s timing complicates expectations for the effects of the disaster on executive support. The earthquake occurred during the final 12 days of Michelle Bachelet’s tenure, and the immediate response to the disaster was arguably her government’s responsibility. However, responsibility for the longer-term response, including nearly all the reconstruction, fell to Sebastian Piñera’s government. Given these confounding factors, executive support is not a particularly useful indicator of specific support in this case. Nonetheless, we later report analyses of evaluations of the two executives.

Turning to diffuse support, we distinguish two forms: commitment to democratic institutions and support for democratic values. For the former, we assess willingness to accept nondemocratic rule using two scales. The first measures acceptance of a military coup d’état under conditions of high unemployment, high crime, and high corruption.²⁰ A second measures support for a president governing without congress and the judiciary, that is, an executive self-coup, or autogolpe.²¹ The military coup scale ranges from 0 to 3 and the autogolpe scale, 0 to 2. While Chile has known military but not executive coups, both indicators help gauge the strength of democratic commitment to the rules of the game among the mass public. For the values-based dimension of diffuse democratic support, we use a measure of tolerance of political dissent crafted from an additive scale of respect for dissenters’ political and civil freedoms (range: 0–1; α = .89).²²

Finally, to assess potential system-level implications of disaster damage, we test its linkage to participatory attitudes. Ideally, we could examine civic, political, and social activity. But the survey was fielded so quickly after the disaster that citizens had only a short time to engage in such activities. Thus, our principal measure is a scale based on reported support for taking part in civil society groups, working for political candidates/campaigns, and protesting (range: 0–1, α = .78).²³ Secondarily, we analyze self-reported contacting of local officials, community participation, and attending community meetings. Since these questions refer to participation over the prior twelve months, they are less than ideal measures of postdisaster participation (question wordings are referenced in Notes and provided in the online Supplemental Materials [http://prq.sagepub.com/supplemental/]; note that all supplemental materials referenced in this manuscript are available from the Political Research Quarterly website). However, matching should control for differences in participatory tendencies prior to experiencing (or not) disaster damage, thus giving some justification for inferring that differences across these measures reflect postdisaster differences in participation. Descriptive statistics for the measures are in Supplemental Materials.

Methodological Approach

To test the relationships between disaster-related damage and political support and participation, we use a quasi-experimental design to limit potential bias due to nonrandom assignment. While the location of an earthquake’s epicenter is fairly random (because all of Chile is at risk of a significant quake), people are not randomly assigned to certain geographic areas and, further, the physical effects of the quake are not random. Citizens living in adobe houses, substandard buildings, certain coastal towns, and rural communities were more likely to suffer severe damage to their homes and communities. And these people, in turn, are not a random cross-section of Chileans; on average, they are poorer and less educated.²⁴ Ignoring the nonrandom distribution of damage can bias inferences as to its effects on democratic legitimacy.

A matching approach, in conjunction with an estimated parametric model, helps account for this nonrandom assignment (Ho et al. 2007; Rubin 1979; Sekhon 2009). This strategy has two main analytical benefits. First by empirically approximating the Rubin Causal Model (Rubin 1974), it maps the logic of controlled experiments onto observational data and, thus, increases confidence that the observed relationship is causal. That is, matching results in few to no significant measured differences between groups that suffered damage and those that did not, and thus approximates the effect of random assignment in a controlled experiment. Relatedly, matching to construct a dataset of like individuals based on the logic of treatment and control facilitates our second goal—to remove selection and cluster bias due to nonrandom assignment of disaster damage. This method classifies individuals who perceived home and/or neighborhood disaster damage into the treatment group by using an algorithm to match them to individuals similar on multiple attributes but who did not suffer any damage due to the disaster.

Disaster damage is a nine-point scale constructed by adding self-reported damage to respondents’ homes to damage to their neighborhoods; each constituent item ranges from no damage (0) to completely destroyed (4). To determine treatment and control groups, we collapse our damage scale into a dummy variable where 0 is no damage (control group; 62% of the sample) and 1 is having suffered any house or neighborhood damage (treatment group; 38% of the sample). While an independent, valid measure of respondent’s home and neighborhood damage might provide a useful alternative measure, no such data exist for the Chilean disaster. As Figure 1 indicates, linear distance from the epicenter is a poor measure of damage, especially given the equally destructive effects of the tsunami and roles of building design, construction, and soil composition in determining which structures are unscathed and which are demolished (Anbarci, Escaleras, and Register 2005). Consequently, self-reports are the best measures of damage for the question at hand. This conclusion is supported by the low correlation (r = .14) between the distance from the epicenter to a respondent’s neighborhood (GPS coded by interviewers) and the interviewer’s assessment of damage.²⁵ Moreover, interviewers’ and respondents’ damage assessments correlate highly (r = .72), perhaps because the interviews took place in respondents’ homes; the discrepancy likely owes to the more limited scope of interviewers’ assessments but, regardless, respondents’ perceptions are validated by their close match with those of an objective observer.²⁶

Because exact matching is not feasible with our data, we estimate the effects of damage using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis (ordered logit for support of coups and autogolpes) on the matched dataset with the full range of the damage scale and controls to help account for any remaining imbalance in the data between those who suffered damage and those who did not.²⁷

Besides accounting for selection and clustering effects, matching also reduces the dependence of OLS and maximum likelihood ratio (MLE) results on the parametric form used in estimation (Ho et al. 2007). And using parametric models after matching provides further robustness for the matching process. As long as the matching algorithm does not produce extremely unbalanced matches, biases are avoided if either the matching model or the parametric model is properly specified (Ho et al. 2007). That is, the results are less likely to change if we use a somewhat different estimation technique or matching algorithm. Multiple placebo tests (reported in Supplemental Materials) suggest the matched dataset indeed accounts for selection effects. Placebo tests compare means between the treatment and control groups of variables that are correlated with suffering damage but could not be affected by the disaster. If matching is effective for a variable, the difference of means between the two groups observed prior to matching will disappear. For our placebo tests, we selected three variables related to past behaviors and experiences. Results in Supplemental Materials show damage is not a statistically significant predictor of (1) frequency of discussing politics during the last campaign, (2) working for a candidate or party during the last campaign, or (3) being offered a “gift” in exchange for a vote in past elections. Passing these placebo tests lends greater confidence to our matching results.

To determine which of the respondents who suffered no damage best match those who did, we use a genetic search algorithm, GenMatch (Sekhon 2011), which finds an optimal balance between the two groups. As matching on variables likely to be affected by the disaster could bias the results, the matching algorithm includes only those variables that are unlikely to be affected by the disaster and likely to be related to support for democracy. These include gender, age, presidential vote in 2010, education, marital status, ethnicity, number of children, wealth, region, urban/rural, and city size.²⁸ As noted, we also include these variables as controls in the parametric models to account for any remaining imbalance (see Note 27). The results presented below are based on 1-1 matching but do not differ substantively using 3-1 matching.²⁹

Results

Does disaster damage lower specific and diffuse support, and raise participatory inclinations? Considering specific support first, we find damage significantly decreased the legitimacy of local government (Table 1, data column 1; see Supplemental Materials for full results of all analyses³⁰). Citizens who report greater earthquake and tsunami damage are more critical of their local government, the democratic institution most proximate to Chilean disaster victims. The effects are fairly substantial. Moving from no damage (0) to the highest damage level on our indicator (8) predicts a decrease in support for local institutions equivalent to 0.11 units on the 0 to 1 scale.

Table 1.

Effects of Damage on Diffuse Support of Democracy and Participation.

	Local government	Support for coups	Support for autogolpes	Political tolerance	Political participation
Damage scale	−0.014***	0.084***	0.173***	−0.017***	0.022***
	0.004	0.036	0.06	0.005	0.005
Observations	986	1010	990	942	996
Log likelihood		−1077.22	−374.01
R²/pseudo R²	.09	.03	.04	.15	.14

Note. Robust standard errors are presented in italics. Ordinary least squares (OLS) analysis for data columns 1, 4, and 5; ordered logit for data columns 2 and 3, with predicted probabilities reported in Table 2. Results with controls (included but not shown above) are available in Supplemental Materials (http://prq.sagepub.com/supplemental/).

Significant at 10 percent. **Significant at 5 percent. ***Significant at 1 percent.

It is noteworthy that citizen perceptions of damage and support for Bachelet (the outgoing president) and likewise for Piñera (the newly inaugurated president) are not significantly related (reported in Supplemental Materials). This likely reflects the difficulty of assigning responsibility to either executive as the disaster and its aftermath bridged across their terms. Alternatively, one might posit that Chileans’ support for specific institutions and actors decayed in general due to the earthquake. Yet, comparisons to data from the 2008 AmericasBarometer survey in Chile counter this explanation. For example, mean approval of Bachelet increases across the two waves, while trust in municipalities decreases slightly—a result our analyses suggest is at least partly driven by the negative effect disaster damage had on local government support for a subset of Chileans.³¹

The results of our core analyses (Table 1, data columns 2–4) match our gloomy expectations for diffuse support. Damage bolsters support for military coups and for presidents shuttering congress and ignoring the judiciary in times of crisis (an autogolpe). As Table 2 shows, going from no home and neighborhood damage to complete destruction raises support for coups and autogolpes by 16 and 15 percentage points, respectively. Furthermore, damage lowers tolerance of political dissent. Moving from the minimum to the maximum on the damage variable decreases political tolerance 0.14 units on the 0 to 1 scale, an effect size similar to disaster damage’s effect on support for local institutions. By reducing diffuse support for democratic values and institutions, natural disaster damage erodes commitment to the basic principles of an open, plural, and competitive society.

Table 2.

Predicted Probabilities for Ordered Logit Models.

	Discrete probability change: 0 to 8 on damage scale
Support coup: 0	−0.16**
Support coup: 1	0.02**
Support coup: 2	0.08**
Support coup: 3	0.06**
Support autogolpe: 0	−0.15**
Support autogolpe: 1	0.09**
Support autogolpe: 2	0.06*

Significant at 10 percent. **Significant at 5 percent.

Our final analysis (Table 1, data column 5) suggests damage also amplifies participatory attitudes. Once again, the substantive effect of damage is similar to our other findings: a person reporting the greatest (compared with no) damage is more supportive of participation by 0.18 units on a 0 to 1 scale. We also assessed the extent to which damage predicts several dependent variables capturing three acts of participation: contacting local officials, community participation, and attending community meetings (results in Supplemental Materials). In each case, damage is a significant, positive predictor of participation. On one hand, if disaster damage victims become active, engaged citizens, this could be a healthy sign from the perspective of democratic quality and stability. On the other hand, when coupled with not simply criticism of specific actors but decreased support for the democratic rules of the game and tolerance norms, the overall portrait of the public opinion effects of the Chilean disaster is more unsettling.

Conclusion

According to the USGS, since 1900, only four earthquakes have struck the earth harder than Chile’s 8.8 temblor on February 27, 2010. NASA estimates it shifted the Earth’s axis about 8 cm and, thus, shortened the length of a day by 1.26 µs. Unique in some ways, the quake is just one of many natural disasters that have struck and will strike developing democracies. Indeed, climate change (Steinbruner, Stern, and Husbands 2012) and urbanization (Olson and Gawronski 2010; Poggione et al. 2012) increase human exposure to natural hazards even as better building construction decreases vulnerability. Against this backdrop, we offer a theoretical framework that predicts natural disasters will erode both specific and diffuse political support, while catalyzing political action, in less established democracies.

Leveraging postdisaster national survey data from Chile and a quasi-experimental design, we find disaster damage lowered citizens’ system support on several fronts while heightening their participatory orientations. Hence, the disaster not only identified vulnerability in the Chilean political system’s ability to prepare for and respond to disasters, it also revealed new cracks in the foundations of its legitimacy and potentially volatile stirrings for greater participation.

These results may not paint a rosy picture for democratic consolidation in Chile, but they should not be interpreted in overly pessimistic terms. In fact, the public opinion effects of Chile’s natural disaster seem broadly similar to those of economic contractions (Córdova and Seligson 2010; Graham and Sukhtankar 2004; Merolla and Zechmeister 2009), corruption scandals (Pérez-Liñán 2007; Seligson 2002), and crime waves (Cruz 2003; Diamond 1999; Malone 2010; Pérez 2003) in other newer democracies. Like other Latin American political systems that have weathered legitimacy crises in recent years without collapsing, Chile’s system remains intact. Moreover, as we have emphasized throughout, our assessment of the public opinion consequences of the natural disaster is based on data gathered in the transition between the disaster emergency phase and the stabilization and reconstruction stages. While we do not examine the dynamics of public opinion as reconstruction efforts rolled out, our results suggest where reconstruction efforts succeeded, the downtick in democratic public opinion among disaster victims could be attenuated. Indeed, survey data indicates that by July 2010, presidential approval and perceptions that Chile is progressing were higher in the regions most affected by the disaster (Cabezas and Navia n.d.).

Regarding the uptick in support for participation in civil society groups, political campaigns/candidacies, and protests among Chilean disaster victims, recent theorizing argues new democracies survive legitimacy crises when disgruntled citizens channel their discontent into conventional forms of political engagement (Booth and Seligson 2009). Yet the disaster elevated support for coups d’état and autogolpes and intolerance toward political dissidents. So while we have no reason to expect Chilean democracy to collapse as a result of the attitudinal shifts following the 2010 earthquake and tsunami, the full implications of this heightened participatory orientation for the quality and stability of Chile’s political system are unclear.

Do we see echoes of the types of shifts detected in our study in the stream of protests and strikes that rocked Chile after February 27, 2010? It is beyond the limits of our data to rigorously assess this question and on the surface, a direct link may seem dubious. That said, by generating democratic discontent and mobilization, a natural disaster might have affected the general climate and opportunity structure for social movements and other organized groups to stress the system. This assertion resonates with the idea that natural disasters can be critical junctures that spark a path-dependent process of political change (Gawronski and Olson 2013; Olson and Gawronski 2003). In fact, the potential link between the February 27 disaster and later student protests was not lost on President Sebastián Piñera who claimed, “[W]e suffered a second earthquake that affected our educational system. The student strikes and occupations of schools resulted in enormous infrastructural damage”³² (cited in Cabezas and Navia n.d.).

Searching Chile’s leading daily newspaper, El Mercurio, we found more than thirty-five stories referring to the earthquake and protests in the eighteen months after February 27, 2010. Compared with the eighteen months prior, nearly 50 percent more stories mentioned protest terms³³ in the eighteen months afterward. Even before the student protests of 2011, there were indications of increased protest activity in Chile: in the twelve months after the earthquake, Chileans made significantly more Google searches for terms related to protests, strikes, and marches than during the twelve months leading up to it.³⁴

Viewed comparatively, our results for the Chilean case suggest natural disasters could erode legitimacy even more in new democracies with less robust reserves. Such a claim could be probed with AmericasBarometer survey data collected after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. Our theoretical framework should travel well to other postdisaster young democracies, as should our empirical approach, which draws on ongoing research into the adaptation of matching methods to analyze political phenomena. As such, this study provides a foundation for continued investigation of the public opinion effects of natural disasters, research that is crucial to advancing our understandings of democracy and the attitudes and behaviors that help sustain it.

Less established democracies face myriad challenges. Among them are natural disasters that can overwhelm the political system and, in turn, lower legitimacy and raise participatory fervor. If and how well governments respond to disaster victims, renew commitment to democratic processes and values, and channel political participation will vary from case to case. What our analyses show is that, even in a less established democracy that is comparatively stronger than many others around the world, natural disasters can shake democratic public opinion.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Glenn Abney, Larry Bartels, Taylor Boas, John Geer, Cindy Kam, Patricio Navia, Richard Olson, Mitchell Seligson, Matthew Singer, and members of the Behavioral Research Workshop at Vanderbilt for comments on previous drafts, and Mollie Cohen and Matthew Layton for research assistance. We thank the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and Juan Pablo Luna for their efforts to implement the 2010 AmericasBarometer study in Chile, and we thank LAPOP’s major supporters (including the United States Agency for International Development, the United Nations Development Program, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Vanderbilt University) for making AmericasBarometer data available.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, SES Awards #1036411, 1036354, and 1036414, and the Latin American Public Opinion Project.

Notes

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