The devastating floods in Nepal and Tibet that have left more than 1,000 people dead and thousands missing, including Americans, serve as a powerful reminder: Climate change is bringing more natural disasters to humanity. To save lives, societies must do all we can to prepare.
In some ways, the world is progressing in this fight. There are fewer deaths generally in each disaster these days. But in one of the most important ways, the world is backsliding: the strength of democratic institutions.
A great deal of research shows a direct link between how democratic a society is and how well it protects its people. “Democracies and nations with higher-quality institutions suffer less death from natural disaster,” an MIT study explained more than 20 years ago.
New York University Professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has explored why this is. Speaking to a YouTube channel affiliated with the Kyiv School of Economics, he used earthquakes as an example. “The number of deaths is consistently lower in democratic societies than in autocratic societies,” even when controlled for population density, per capita income, and more. “When you’re an autocrat, when you depend on few people to keep you in power, you don’t care very much about the rest of the people…. When you are a larger coalition, you need the support of many, many people, often millions of people.”
A recent study in the journal Nature looked specifically at flooding and came to the same conclusion: “Accountable and inclusive power-sharing institutions, which are essential features of democracy, facilitate impartial politics, which is important to secure the rights, representation, and protection of vulnerable social groups. Transparent decision-making, regulated competition, and a free and independent press further serve as checks on the exercise of political power, including in disaster risk reduction.”
The more truly democratic a place is, the more likely it is to protect and save its people. That requires strong democratic structures, with real limits on power and everyone’s rights secured.
Though Nepal is technically a democracy, it just became one officially in 2008, and passed a constitution only in 2015. Democratic structures take decades to build and strengthen. So does a democratic mentality, in which people feel empowered to hold their leaders accountable, and leaders feel a responsibility to voters.
Democracy is in danger, both worldwide and in the United States. “Almost all aspects of democracy register far-reaching declines during the last decade – a dramatic reversal compared to 25 years ago,” the annual V-Dem report on global democracy said. Three-quarters of the world’s population now lives in autocracies, according to the report. And, “The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is at its lowest level in over 50 years, primarily due to ongoing autocratization in the USA.”
Trump’s cronyism shows how unchecked power weakens democracy. Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, wrote about this for the National Bar Association, under the headline, “The Trump Administration’s Rampant Pay-to-Play Corruption Threatens Our Democracy.”
But anti-democratic movements are not limited to the political right. For example, young Americans have an increasingly favorable view of communism. Popular left-wing influencer Hasan Piker praised Russia and China, and called communism the “honorable end goal” of socialism. History shows that communist governments, like other non-democratic ones, prevent basic freedoms that make societies safer. (Though China has some fortified buildings and warning systems to protect some of its people, its rural areas remain largely more vulnerable.)
Democratic accountability acts as a structural safeguard. “Even the poorest democratic countries that have faced terrible droughts or floods or other natural disasters have been able to feed their people without experiencing a famine,” Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winner for economics, wrote in the Journal of Democracy.
As extremism grows, the most important political battle of our time isn’t about left vs. right. It’s about everyone committed to shoring up democracy working together against those who would move us away from it.
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” Winston Churchill once said. It’s worth fighting for. Extreme weather and the disasters that accompany it are yet another reason. If democracy continues to weaken, it isn’t just our governmental structures that could collapse. It’s our buildings, too.
Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.
Thanks for sharing this column that accompanies my latest episode, The Contrarian! The fights for democracy and against climate disasters are deeply intertwined. Folks: Feel free to share thoughts, questions, and ideas over at https://theystandcorrected.substack.com/