Media, institutions, and government action: Prevention vs. palliation in the time of cholera

•We study how media and the quality of institutions affect government action.•Our focus is on preventive vs. palliative effort around a natural disaster.•More media activity increases palliative effort but reduces preventive effort.•More democratic institutions lead to more palliative but less preventive effort.•Empirical evidence based on natural disasters largely supports these hypotheses.

This paper studies how media and the quality of institutions affect government action taken before and after a natural disaster. Provided that more media activity is focused on post-disaster action, we show that more media activity and better democratic institutions both contribute positively to the palliative effort after the disaster, although corruption has a negative effect that decreases as media activity increases. On the preventive effort, however, media and democracy both have a negative effect, as does corruption. We provide empirical evidence based on major cholera epidemics and other natural disasters around the world, which largely support these hypotheses.