[Data Analysis]

Abstract: How does exposure to natural disasters shape citizen-state relations? While disasters can undermine social cohesion and diminish political trust among survivors, they also create opportunities for citizens to make new demands on governments. This project examines how climate risk intersects with household political strategies to shape accountability mechanisms in weak institutional contexts, such as urban slums and remote villages. Drawing on an original face-to-face survey of over 2,000 households, 18 focus groups, and 75 in-depth interviews with citizens, civil society activists, and local government officials in two Indian states, Bihar and Gujarat, we find that disaster exposure can spur collective action even in resource constrained settings. Specifically, households that experience more severe exposure to recurrent floods are significantly more likely to engage in protests and attend community meetings compared to those with less exposure. These associations remain robust across multiple model specifications, including household and individual-level controls for socioeconomic status, ethnic identity, and migration incidence, as well as unobserved differences in local political and institutional conditions. Using evidence from focus groups and interviews, we further demonstrate that disasters can reveal to states their own capacity constraints and encourage them to invest in building institutional capacities across a range of administrative and policy domains.