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.

十分之九的宪法都包含明确的紧急条款，旨在帮助政府应对危及许多人或国家生存的特殊事件。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特殊事件？ (2) 紧急宪法的哪些具体部分效果最好？我们发现，在控制自然灾害严重程度的情况下，紧急宪法赋予行政部门的优势越多，自然灾害造成的死亡人数就越多。由于这是一个意想不到的结果，我们讨论了一些可能的解释，最合理的解释是政府利用自然灾害作为增强权力的借口。此外，越容易宣布进入紧急状态，对基本人权的负面影响就越大。有趣的是，就拯救生命而言，总统制民主国家比议会制民主国家更有能力应对自然灾害，而独裁国家的情况则要差得多，因为灾后赋权权利受到严重影响。