The relationship between terrorist activities and states of emergency has never been explored in a cross-country perspective. This chapter is a first step to change that. Given that a terror act has been committed, what are the factors that lead governments to declare a state of emergency – or refrain from declaring it? And given that a state of emergency has been declared, what are the effects thereof? In this chapter, two world regions are analyzed: seventy-nine countries having Western-style constitutions and the member states of the Organization of Islamic Countries. We find that more terrorist incidents increase the likelihood of a state of emergency. Interestingly, emergencies are less likely to be declared in election years, supposedly because governments believe them to be unpopular. Once a state of emergency is declared, it generally leads to substantially more government repression. Finally, countries already under a state of emergency are more likely to suffer from additional terror attacks, challenging the effectiveness of states of emergency.

In this chapter, 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.