When Crisis Strikes:How Natural Disasters Transform Fairness Norms Across Generations

An unexplored impact of natural disasters is the scarcity they create and the resulting reallocation of resources. This paper examines this effect by analyzing how disaster-driven scarcity reshapes fairness considerations. Using data from the International Disaster Database and the European Social Survey, we show that disaster exposure increases perceptions of solidarity-driven fairness, including social support, rewards for effort, and equal access to services, while reducing perceptions of scarcity-driven fairness such as wage equality, access to education or the functioning of the political system. As disasters are a cross-border phenomenon, we further study spillovers from neighboring countries and find that they can strengthen solidarity-based fairness while simultaneously heightening skepticism toward institutional and societal fairness. Finally, we explore mechanisms, i.e., ιnstitutional trust, FDI, EU funds, that condition these relationships and shape how individuals interpret fairness norms after a disaster.