associations, time spent socializing in community groups, and membership of developmental organizations. Finally, the fifth area is the level of civic activism, which measures the extent to which social practices encourage a more active and critical interaction with political authorities. The strength of civil society is measured using survey data on participation in civic activities such as petitions or marches, access to media through newspaper and radio, and the density of international civil society organizations<sup>3</sup> (World Bank 2008). Table 2.0 illustrates the correlations between the various indicators.

# **Model Specification**

The equation to be estimated is given by: Where _DEATH_ is the rate of deaths from natural disasters and _INST_ is an indicator of formal or informal institutions. In addition we include a number of control variables: _DISASTERS_ is the number of disasters which occurred during the decade, _POP_ is population, _POPDENS_ is population density, _GDP_ is GDP per capita measured in international dollars, _e_ is the country-specific error term and _i_ is country i. We also include an interactive term _DISASTERS*GDP_ , in recognition of the fact that the impact of the number of natural disasters may vary according to the level of GDP per capita, and in particular that poor countries may be vulnerable to a higher frequency of hazard events. To avoid potential problems with multicollinearity, we include only one of the institutional measures at a time; a final model is included using an interaction between Voice and Accountability and Civic Activism, reflecting the hypothesis that the effect of participative institutions on disaster responsiveness is likely to be greater in societies with well-organized NGO sectors<sup>4</sup> . Finally, in order to overcome potential endogeneity between natural disaster and our independent variables, all the independent variables are lagged to 1995<sup>5</sup> . Our models therefore test the ability of a range of variables to predict the rate of deaths from natural disasters over the course of the subsequent decade.

> 3 Civic activism differs from measures of formal political institutions, such as the democracy measure produced as part of the Polity dataset, as it measures the specifically social practices and norms that ‘make democracy work’. These informal institutions include a high level of civic informedness regarding political debates and policies, a willingness among citizens to express their views through civic forums such as community meetings or the press, and mobilisation to place pressure on officials to deliver better public services, for example via protest or petition. Studies such as Putnam et al. (1993) have identified these practices as essential for maintaining government efficacy, in addition to the existence of formal rules such as elections and constitutional guarantees of civil liberties, which are captured by the Voice and Accountability measure from the Worldwide Governance Indicators.

> 4 A correlation matrix between the social institutional variables in provided in Table 2.0.

> 5 The governance indicators are lagged to 1996, the first year for which estimates exist.

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