Trial by Fire: a Natural Disaster's Impact on Attitudes toward the Government in Rural Russia

2012. No. WP BRP.

Lazarev Y. A., Sobolev A. S., Soboleva I. V., Sokolov B.

This study aims to explore the logic of political support under a non-democratic regime by investigating the impact of a natural disaster on the political attitudes of the local population. The research exploits the enormous wildfires that occurred in rural Russia during the summer of 2010 as a natural experiment. Since wildfire spreads due to the direction of the wind, the local distribution of fire is totally random: one village may burn while the neighboring village is left unscathed. We test the effects of this exogenous variation with a survey of almost 800 respondents in randomly selected villages, 34 of which were burned and 36 of which were unburned, in the four regions of Russia that were most severely affected. Contrary to the conventional scholarly wisdom that suggests that natural disasters cause people to blame politicians, our study finds that in the burned villages there is higher support for the government at all levels, namely for the United Russia Party, the village head, the governor, Prime Minister Putin, and President Medvedev. These finding are robust even for models that control for the generous governmental aid provided to the villages that were damaged by the fires. We interpret the results within the framework of system justification theory, developing it by adding to individual characteristics the factors of the political regime and the demonstration effect.

Keywords: российские исследования, political support, attitudes, authoritarianism, natural experiments, Russia