Trial by Fire
On January 26, 2012, at the regular seminar of LCSR junior researcher of LCSR Egor Lazarev gave a talk on "Trial by Fire: The impact of natural disaster toward the government in Rural Russia".
On January 26, 2012, at the regular seminar of LCSR junior researcher of LCSR Egor Lazarev gave a talk on "Trial by Fire: The impact of natural disaster toward the government in Rural Russia". Study investigates the impact of natural disasters, namely forest fires that occurred in Russia at summer, 2010 on the political preferences of the local population.
The author began his presentation with various examples of effects of natural phenomena on the results of voting in different countries. In particular, in the paper of Akena and Bartels describes the voting against Woodrow Wilson in the coastal counties of New Jersey affected by the unprecedented shark attacks a few months before the elections of 1916. This story, as well as examples from the history of ancient Egypt, where the overthrow of pharaohs often occurred due to the problems in irrigation systems, massacres of Jews during plague epidemics and the reality of modern America, where ratings of opposition parties increased during severe droughts, have shown that citizens tend to blame the current government for natural disasters.
Hypothesis of study was that the residents of the burnt villages are less likely to support the government than those in unburned villages. The survey was conducted nearly 800 respondents in the 4 most affected regions of Russia in July and August 2011, a year after the fires. After describing the methodology of the study, which is the natural experiment, the author came to the results.
According to the results of work, in contradiction to the usual logic, natural disasters do not lead to riots against politicians, and in burnt-out villages support of government is higher at all levels. The population of these villages began to support Mayor, Governor, “United Russia”, Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev. This effect is robust even for models with elements that have received more compensation provided by the government for villages that have been damaged by fire.
This study is a significant contribution to the debate on the political economy of natural disasters, political views and legitimacy of undemocratic regimes. After the report possible areas of further research were discussed.