Barking Up the Wrong Tree: How Political Alignment Shapes Electoral Backlash from Natural Disasters

Abstract

While scholarship on “retrospective voting” has found that incumbent politicians can be punished for a range of events outside their control, the literature has paid scant attention to the role of political alignment between the different levels of government in disaster responses and its implications for voting decisions. We argue that retrospective voters punish only opposition incumbents (candidates in office but not aligned with the government leader), who have limited access to government resources for relief, for natural disasters. We use monthly data on precipitation and evaporation to capture droughts and floods in India’s four thousand State Assembly electoral constituencies over the years 1977–2007. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that Members of State Assembly from the party of the Prime or Chief Minister do not face an electoral backlash under bad weather conditions during the monsoon season, whereas opposition politicians face major losses.

(Un)Natural Disasters: Electoral Cycles in Disaster Relief

“…10. This finding would be consistent with other studies that find that voters reward incumbents for drought relief in India (Blankenship et al, 2020;Cole et al, 2012) and Mexico (Fuchs & Rodriguez-Chamussy, 2014). 11.…”

“…7.Many studies highlight how voters may punish politicians for disasters outside the politicians’ control (Achen & Bartels, 2017), but reward politicians for providing relief (Blankenship et al, 2020; Bechtel & Hainmueller, 2011; Gasper & Reeves, 2011; Healy & Malhotra, 2009). …”

The electoral benefits of environmental position‐taking: Floods and electoral outcomes in England 2010–2019

“…This indicates that the increased vote share for the Conservatives in flooded areas could in part be due to the fact that those areas are also those most likely to be the site of flood defence projects. This is consistent with previous accounts that have found flood spending to be linked to an advantage for incumbents (Bechtel & Hainmueller, 2011;Blankenship et al, 2021;Cole et al, 2012;Gasper & Reeves, 2011;Healy & Malhotra, 2009;Lazarev et al, 2014), and it somewhat weakens the rally-round-the-leader interpretation of the models in Table 1. By contrast, the effect of flooding on the Labour vote share is both larger in magnitude and stronger in significance in the 2019 models that control for flood defence spending.…”

“…The stress of a major flood may make voters reward the party in power for disaster relief, as has been found in several previous studies (Bechtel & Hainmueller, 2011; Cole et al., 2012; Gasper & Reeves, 2011; Healy & Malhotra, 2009; Lazarev et al., 2014). Sometimes this effect works to counter the effects of blind retrospection (Blankenship et al., 2021; Cole et al., 2012; Gasper & Reeves, 2011). There is evidence that these effects may be in part conditioned by voter assessments of policy response and perceptions of policy options (Baccini & Leemann, 2021; Bechtel & Mannino, 2020, 2021), both of which can be shaped by elite behaviour and elite cues.…”

“…Second, it calls into question the adequacy of two of the most prominent accounts of the electoral effects of natural disasters – the blind retrospection and rally‐round the leader explanations – and suggests that additional theories are needed that take account of varying partisan effects over time. Third, it builds on studies that examine political and policy aspects of natural disaster effects (Baccini & Leemann, 2021; Bechtel & Mannino, 2020, 2021; Blankenship et al., 2021; Fair et al., 2017; Malhotra & Kuo, 2008) to develop a theoretical account of the impact of flooding on electoral outcomes based on political context, and it provides evidence that is consistent with that account.…”