Natural Disasters and Clientelism: the Case of Floods and Landslides in Colombia*

Abstract What are the eects of natural disasters on electoral results? Some authors claim that catastrophes have a negative eect on the survival of leaders in a democracy because voters have a propensity to punish politicians for not preventing or poorly handling a crisis. In contrast, this paper nds that these events might be benecial for leaders. Disasters are linked to leader survival through clientelism: they generate an in- ow of resources in the form of aid, which increase money for buying votes. Analyzing the rainy season of 2010-2011 in Colombia, considered its worst disaster in history, I use a dierence-in-dierences strategy to show that in the local election incumbent parties beneted from the disaster. The result is robust to dierent specications and alternative explanations. Moreover, places receiving more aid and those with judicial evidence of vote-buying irregularities, are more likely to reelect the incumbent, supporting the mechanism proposed by this paper.