Nine out of 10 constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions, intended to help governments cope with extraordinary events that endanger many people or the existence of the state. We ask two questions: (1) does the constitutionalization of emergency provisions help governments to cope with disasters and other extraordinary events? (2) What particular parts of emergency constitutions fare best? We find that the more advantages emergency constitutions confer to the executive, the higher the number of people killed as a consequence of a natural disaster, controlling for its severity. As this is an unexpected result, we discuss a number of potential explanations, the most plausible being that governments use natural disasters as a pretext to enhance their power. Furthermore, the easier it is to call a state of emergency, the larger the negative effects on basic human rights. Interestingly, presidential democracies are better able to cope with natural disasters than parliamentary ones in terms of lives saved, whereas autocracies do significantly worse in the sense that empowerment rights seriously suffer in the aftermath of a disaster.

十分之九的宪法包含明确的紧急规定，旨在帮助政府应对危及许多人或国家存在的特殊事件。我们提出两个问题：（1）紧急条款的宪法化是否有助于政府应对灾难和其他非常事件？(2) 紧急宪法的哪些特定部分表现最好？我们发现，紧急宪法赋予行政部门的优势越多，在控制其严重性的情况下，因自然灾害而丧生的人数就越高。由于这是一个出乎意料的结果，我们讨论了一些可能的解释，最合理的解释是政府以自然灾害为借口来增强其权力。此外，呼叫紧急状态越容易，对基本人权的负面影响越大。有趣的是，就挽救生命而言，总统制民主国家比议会制民主国家更能应对自然灾害，而独裁国家的表现则要差得多，因为赋权权利在灾难发生后严重受损。