Analyses of the occurrence of natural disasters show that in large coalition systems, such as democracies, their occurrence has little effect on protest or leader survival. However, if large numbers of people die in these disasters, more protests occur and leader survival diminishes. In contrast, for leaders in small coalition systems, the occurrence of disasters increases protests and reduces tenure, but the level of fatalities has little effect. The anticipation of these potential political effects accounts for why many more people die in disasters in small coalition systems than in large coalition systems.

What determines the level of a country's military expenditures? Both history and theory indicate that military expenditures are strategic in nature-a country's military expenditures depend on the military allocations of other countries. This article examines two potential sources of interdependence: geographic proximity and alliance membership. Estimation results from spatial autoregressive models show that a country's military expenditures are positively correlated with those of its geographic neighbors. Since countries may respond positively to their neighbors' military spending due to conflict or cooperation, the article uses alliance membership as an alternative measure of contiguity to discover potential cooperative relationships among geographic neighbors. Results indicate that a country's military expenditures are positively correlated with the military spending of its alliance partners. This correlation is stronger between members of the same defensive alliance.

Learning from natural disasters is predominantly regarded as beneficial: Individuals and governments learn to cope and thereby reduce damage and loss of life in future disasters. We argue against this standard narrative and point to two principal ways in which learning from past disasters can have detrimental consequences: First, investment in protective infrastructures may not only stimulate settlement in hazardprone areas but also foster a false impression of security, which can prevent individuals from fleeing to safe places when hazard strikes. Second, if disaster events in the past did not have catastrophic consequences, affected individuals do not take future events sufficiently seriously. As a consequence, learning from disasters is a double-edged sword that can prevent large scale damage and human loss most of the time but results in the worst case scenario when a disaster occurs at an unexpected scale and public preparedness measures fail. We demonstrate the devastating impact of misplaced trust in public preparedness measures and misleading lessons drawn from past experience for the case of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. Our paper contributes to the literatures on 'negative learning' and 'hazard maladaptation' by demonstrating that a lack of past experience with tsunami mortality in a municipality substantively increases mortality in the Tohoku tsunami. 3Man has three ways of learning. First, on meditation; that is the noblest. Secondly, on imitation; that is the easiest. Thirdly, on experience; that is the bitterest.Attributed to Confucius, cited in Lee and Jones (2004, p. vii) IntroductionThe 2011 Tohoku tsunami that affected the entire East Coast of Honshu, Japan's main island, raised two questions: Why did so many people die during the event despiteJapan's experience with tsunamis that should have resulted in sufficient disaster preparedness to avoid most of the deaths? Why did the Tohoku mortality vary widely between municipalities? The first question attracted much more attention in the media and among social scientists studying the social causes of disaster vulnerability than the second question. We develop an integrated answer to both questions arguing that local governments and affected citizens believed too much in infrastructural protectiontsunami walls and shelters -with the consequence that large parts of the affected population stayed close to the shore watching the incoming tsunami rather than fleeing inland or seeking to reach higher grounds.Our article contributes to the growing literature on 'learning from disaster'. Many social scientists believe that natural disasters offer a window of opportunity for individuals and policy makers to learn and better adapt to natural hazards (Birkmann et al., 2010). view is that at worst the lessons of disasters are ignored while at best learning from

Quiroz Flores, Alejandro. (2012) A Competing Risks Model of War Termination and Leader Change. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468‐2478.2012.00735.x 
© 2012 International Studies Association Recent research suggesting that leader transitions increase the probability of war termination is based on the assumption that leader change is exogenous. However, the exogeneity of leader change needs to be tested, not assumed. This paper uses a bivariate discrete survival model to test the exogeneity of leader change and correctly estimate its partial effect on war termination. The paper extends the analysis by estimating a competing risks model of types of leader transitions. The evidence shows that leader change in large coalition systems never increases the probability of war termination, while leader change in small coalition systems never reduces the probability of war termination. In short, leader transitions in autocratic systems are more likely to bring interstate war to an end than leader transitions in democratic ones. The study also shows that the marginal effect of leader change fades away as the war progresses, and that war has negative duration‐dependence.