On February 27, 2010, Chile was rocked by an earthquake registering 8.8 on the Richter scale, followed by a tsunami that ravaged the coast. While the capital, Santiago, experienced comparatively little damage, population centers closer to the epicenter, such as Concepción and Talca, as well as villages and towns along Chile's vast coastline, were devastated. Similar to concerns brought up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, these horrific events raise questions about the political aftershocks of the Chilean state's slow and fumbled response and the ensuing humanitarian crisis.
This project investigates the effects of the recent personal- and community-level damage on Chileans' political perceptions and attitudes. Conditions of crisis affect politics, but the principal investigators argue that the breadth and depth of these costs to the system can be particularly severe in less established democracies where support for democratic values and the system itself is less entrenched. Drawing on extant literature, the researchers hypothesize that, as crisis-affected individuals cope they will express attitudes that are less favorable toward the incumbent, but in newer democracies like Chile, also democratic institutions. At the same time, the PIs expect blame attribution will differ across individuals and affect responses toward the system. Further, the PIs argue that crisis-affected individuals will display lower levels of trust and tolerance.
To assess these expectations and uncover the ways in which the earthquake in Chile has affected public opinion and democratic attitudes, this project adds an oversample and a battery of questions to the AmericasBarometer survey (conducted by Vanderbilt University's Latin American Public Opinion Project [LAPOP] in April 2010) that tap perceived personal and community damage and blame across key state actors and institutions (authoritarian attitudes are already on the questionnaire). In addition, the researchers add a geo-tagging feature, principally through GPS units, to the interview process, which will allow them to develop a dataset that includes contextual, objective data on damage to the area proximate to each interview. Finally, the PIs make use of both multi-level models and matching techniques (along with the 2008 AmericasBarometer survey of Chile) to assess variation in public opinion across those who were affected by the earthquake and those who were either less affected and/or not affected.
The project makes several contributions. First, current knowledge of the political fallout of natural disasters in countries with less firmly entrenched democratic institutions is quite thin. Extant studies indicate that crisis conditions in long-standing democracies are often accompanied by shifts in attitudes and dispositions that can influence how citizens behave towards elected officials, the political system, and their fellow citizens. The political and social stakes are even higher in the context of new democracies such as Chile, where public support for democracy is strikingly ambivalent. This research will contribute to a better understanding of the interaction between natural disasters and democracy. Second, the data, along with all AmericasBarometer 2010 data, will be made accessible in numerous forms, including LAPOP's free online interactive website, by the end of 2010. Third, the use of GPS units to geo-tag interviews, and the resulting analyses, will provide a foundation for similar future research, such as a project in Haiti in 2011.
RAPID: Collaborate Research: The Political Costs of Natural Disasters: Democratic Support, Authoritarian Attitudes and Blame Attribution after Chile’s2010 Earthquake This project investigated the public opinion consequences of Chile’s Feb. 27, 2010 magnitude 8.8 earthquake and tsunami. Since natural disasters have major electoral implications for governing officials in long-standing democracies and destabilizing effects for non-democratic leaders, we looked for signs of both dissatisfaction with incumbents at the federal and municipal levels as well as more profound indications of stress on the political system itself. Our data collection included survey questions added to the AmericasBarometer Survey (fielded in May-June 2010) regarding respondents’ perceptions of the degree of disaster-related damage to themselves and their community, and their evaluations of different state and non-state actors in the wake of the disaster. In addition, this grant funded an oversample of non-affected areas to help assess the impact of the disaster by comparing those who experienced damage and those who did not. It also supportes the purchase of GPS devices so that interviewers tag respondents’ blocks with GPS coordinates to be later used for assessing scope, location, and diffusion of damage and attitudes. Our analyses show that those who experienced damage report lower levels of support for incumbent municipal governments. But disaster damage did not affect presidential approval, likely because the quake struck during a lame duck period two weeks before the formal transfer of power. More ominously, our research suggests disaster damage significantly altered Chileans’ support for democratic politics and norms. Namely, experiencing disaster made citizens far more supportive of military coups d’état, executive self-coups, and far less tolerant of political dissent. We find no substantial effect of damage on interpersonal trust; however, witnessing looting lowered interpersonal trust. Finally, we observed elevated attitudinal support for participation and a greater tendency to political action at the local level among those who suffered damage. Taken together, the results of this study suggest natural disasters may have negative effects on democratic public opinion while simultaneously raising participatory fervor. These phenomena arguably place stress on the political system. Thus far the implications are not yet understood, but we note that Chile is presently experiencing the largest and most sustained wave of protests since the beginning of the transition to democracy in the mid 1980s. Though some of our results have already been published in an edited volume, we also have also used these data to produce a working paper ("Shaking Democracy: The Public Opinion Impact of Chile’s 2010 Disaster") and to spark a larger project comparing how state capacity mitigates the impact of natural disasters on interpersonal trust after earthquakes in Chile (2010), Haiti (2010), and El Salvador (2001).
