Ecology of Freedom: Competitive Tests of the Role of Pathogens, Climate, and Natural Disasters in the Development of Socio-Political Freedom

Previous cross-cultural research suggests that levels of societal freedom across countries are systematically related to three types of ecological threats: prevalence of pathogens, climate challenges, and natural disaster threat. Though their incidence overlaps, the literature has not yet provided a competitive test. The first aim of this study involving 150 countries was to test five rival hypotheses, alternately focused on the above ecological factors and their interactions with economic wealth in explaining country variations in socio-political freedom. The second aim was to address methodological limitations in the literature. Previous research has ignored the possibility that, on average, countries within the same region of the world are more similar to each other than countries from different parts of the world. We addressed this limitation by adding region classification as a random effect to our regression models. Furthermore, we quantified the actual casualties directly caused by natural disasters, while the impacts of disasters were merely assumed in previous research. Accordingly, we first demonstrated that random-effects models were more appropriate than OLS regressions. We then found that pathogen prevalence negatively predicted democracy and media freedom, though economic wealth moderated the effect of pathogen prevalence on economic freedom. In contrast, natural disaster casualties positively predicted political freedom and press freedom only among poor countries. We found no support for hypotheses based on climatic challenges. As predicted, our results provide important methodological implications: (1) statistical non-independence of countries must be modeled; and (2) natural disaster casualties are an important predictor of freedom.