Sudden weather disasters as triggers for ethnic protest in autocracies?

Abstract

Under what conditions do disastrous storms and floods provoke anti-government protests in autocracies? While grievances, as they often occur after disastrous weather events, are necessary preconditions for protests, they are by no means sufficient. This is particularly true in undemocratic states, where protesters typically fear repressive sanctions. Therefore, this essay hypothesizes that disastrous storms and floods primarily result in anti-government mobilization in autocracies when they occur in the homelands of marginalized ethnic groups. In such scenarios, the immediate hardships caused by the disaster come on top of underlying more structural grievances. Moreover, groups with shared ethnic identities are more likely to mobilize for collective action. This argument is tested using quantitative cross-national protest-event data from the Mass Mobilization in Autocracies Database (MMAD). The results of numerous regression analyses on a sample pre-processed with Coarsened Exact Matching to address potential concerns of endogeneity yield robust support for the outlined hypothesis.