Suchergebnisse

Offering exemplars from around the world, including China, Mexico, Nicaragua, and California, this paper argues that disasters must be understood and analyzed more deeply and more often as explicitly political events. The paper also argues that because politics is the "authoritative allocation of values, " the politics-disaster nexus revolves around the allocation of several important values: life safety in the pre-event period, survival in the emergency phase, and "life chances" in the recovery and reconstruction periods. The paper concludes by suggesting that the literatures on agenda control and causal stories/blame management are particularly useful points of departure for analyzing disasters as intrinsically political events-

The life‐safety threat posed by earthquake‐vulnerable buildings is widely recognized. This paper outlines the long battle fought in the City of Los Angeles to enact an ordinance intended to abate the hazard. The author also offers a series of both necessary and sufficient factors explaining Los Angelesl ultimate success.

Outlines the efforts of Los Angeles to enact an ordinance to reduce the threat posed by earthquake-vulnerable buildings.

Earlier studies of economic sanctions underestimated the role and importance of more subtle forms of coercion because they concentrated attention on highly public, formally legislated attempts at economic coercion in world politics, such as the cases of Italy in the 1930s and Rhodesia since 1965. The author agrees with Galtung, Knorr, and others that in highly public cases, sanctions will often fail in their avowed political purpose because they actually stimulate nationalism and thus resistance in the target-state; he argues that in an increasingly (but unequally) interdependent world, relatively subtle sanctions can be politically effective—with only moderately purely economic effects—by exploiting the LDC's typically fragmented interest-group and class structure. In order to describe and explain how such economic coercion works, it is necessary to bridge several "islands" of literature: on economic sanctions, on the structure of dependency, and on the causes of political instability.

A connection between disasters and political unrest has often been suggested, but only case studies/anecdotes have been offered as evidence. To test statistically for a disaster‐political unrest relationship, a causal model is developed that posits a direct and positive linkage between disaster severity and ensuing levels of political unrest. The model further specifies that increased levels of development, income equality, and regime repressiveness dampen post‐disaster political unrest. Using a time‐series between 1966 and 1980, Poisson regression results strongly corroborate the model. The exception is income equality, which has the opposite of the originally hypothesized effect.

A recurring question in the study of disaster effects involves political instability. A relationship has been posited between disasters and various forms of political unrest, and case evidence exists to support the contention. Statistical testing, however, has been lacking. A pilot study, this paper integrates a worldwide-disaster database with a political-instability database and reports time-series cross-section (pooled time-series) findings for 12 countries struck by rapid-onset natural disasters between 1966 and 1980. The regression results, both strong and significant, indicate a positive relationship between disaster severity and political unrest. The unrest, however, can be dampened if not eliminated by governmental repression, the implications of which are most disturbing.

Utah faces serious earthquake risk from the alignment of its major population centers with the historically active Wasatch fault. This paper identifies the origins and traces the life history of the Utah Seismic Safety Advisory Council, paying special attention to the partisan political shift which contributed to its 1981 legislative failures and organizational demise.

Disaster researchers have long been aware that the political context of mitigation and preparedness measures has a formidable impact on their initiation, adoption and implementation. Yet most discussion and reporting of the political aspects of disasters have remained anecdotal, and few scholars have attempted to incorporate systematically political forces into social science models applied to disaster phenomena. This paper represents an explicit attempt to describe and explain the impact of politics on the public policy debate over structural safety in Oroville. California, following a damaging 1975 earthquake.