Profiting from Natural Disaster? Inquiring into the Effectiveness of Emergency Constitutions PRELIMINARY – PLEASE ASK AUTHORS FOR LATEST VERSION BEFORE CITING

of Emergency Constitutions PRELIMINARY – PLEASE ASK AUTHORS FOR LATEST VERSION BEFORE CITING Christian Bjørnskov* and Stefan Voigt Abstract: Today, 9 out of 10 constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions. Their purpose is to help governments cope with extraordinary events that endanger many people or even the existence of the state tout court. In this paper, we deal with two questions: (1) does the constitutionalization of emergency provisions help governments to cope with disasters and other extraordinary events? (2) Among the most common types of emergency constitutions, which ones fare best? We find that the more advantages emergency constitutions confer to the executive, the higher the number of people killed as a consequence of a natural disaster, controlling for its severity. Furthermore, the easier it is to call a state of emergency, the larger the negative effects on basic human rights. Interestingly, presidential democracies are better able to cope with natural disasters than parliamentary ones in terms of lives saved, whereas autocracies do significantly worse in the sense that empowerment rights seriously suffer in the aftermath of a disaster.