Once a natural disaster strikes, a state manages the immediate aftermath as well as the long process of large-scale recovery and rehabilitation. Political science studies of disasters are mostly limited to analysing politicians and voters in the immediate aftermath after the disaster. I study disasters from a different perspective to ask: How does government functioning evolve over the long term after a natural disaster?
I draw on accountability and disaster studies that suggest that political responds positively to pressure, to derive an original hypothesis: local government exhibits a lasting increase in performance level in response to dealing with a natural disaster. My theory holds that occurrence of a disaster leads to the politicians facing a sustained increase in pressure from citizens to perform. This increase in pressure leads to rise in political responsiveness and long-lasting improvement in government performance levels. I assess this hypothesis using the case of India - a middle income democratic country. I use secondary data on country-wide government performance and use the interrupted time series approach to analyse the collected data and find results that support the core hypothesis. I then interview politicians from village to state level across two states of India (Kerala and Uttarakhand), to assess this hypothesis and mechanism.