© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Social Forces 00(00) 1–34, Month 2014 doi: 10.1093/sf/sou104 The author benefited from the comments of Daniel Aldrich, Lori Peek, Shu-Ling Tsai, Michael Hsiao, Xiaogang Wu, Yu Xie, Yandong Zhao, Mingsho Ho, Hsiang-Chieh Lee, Yoshimichi Sato, and Shin Arita, as well as the participants of the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Japanese Sociological Society and the participants of the 2014 International Sociological Association World Congress of the Research Committee 39. He would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions. Rico Yang provided valuable research assistance. Supplementary information and replication data for this article are available at http://www.ios.sinica.edu.tw/fellow/thunghonglin/. The study is supported by the Taiwanese Ministry of Science and Technology, project No. 100–2628-H-001–007-MY4. Please direct correspondence to Thung-Hong Lin, 128 Sec. 2, Academia Rd., Nankang, Taipei 11529, Taiwan; E-mail: zoo42@gate.sinica.edu.tw. Governing Natural Disasters Governing Natural Disasters: State Capacity, Democracy, and Human Vulnerability Thung-Hong Lin, Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica F rom the perspective of historical institutionalism, I argue that state capacity, democracy, and their interaction shape the distribution of human vulnerability in natural disasters. The ruling elite, irrespective of whether it is democratic, has the incentive to develop state capacity to prevent damage caused by natural disasters, which is considered a threat to its rule and revenue. To win elections in a democ- racy, the elite may increase public spending for disaster mitigation in favor of voters’ demands. Democracy also empowers civil society and stimulates social spending, which benefits vulnerable citizens. Thus, a strong state capacity effectively reduces human vulnerability, especially in a democracy. I used panel data from 150 countries between 1995 and 2009 to demonstrate the relationship among state capacity, democ- racy, and the impact of disasters. After controlling for the density and magnitude con- tinuity of natural-disaster hazards, the empirical results I obtained from the multilevel models indicate that democracy reduces the disaster mortality rate, and a strong state capacity mitigates the effect of a disaster on a population, especially in a democ- racy. I also found that state capacity and democracy are more effective in preventing human losses caused by predictable disasters such as floods and storms, rather than earthquakes. Introduction In the new millennium, catastrophic natural disasters have served as a reminder of the connection between fragile governments and human losses. For exam- ple, the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004) claimed 227,898 lives, primarily in three politically fragmented countries: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India (Jayasuriya Governing Natural Disasters 1 Social Forces Advance Access published October 18, 2014 at Academia SinicaLife Science Library on January 7, 2015 http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from