Do natural disasters help the environment? How voters respond and what that means

Abstract

This paper examines whether voters’ experience of extreme weather events such as flooding increases voting in favor of climate protection measures. While the large majority of individuals do not hold consistent opinions on climate issues, we argue that the experience of natural disasters can prime voters on climate change and affect political behavior. Using micro-level geospatial data on natural disasters, we exploit referendum votes in Switzerland, which allows us to obtain a behavioral rather than attitudinal measure of support for policies tackling climate change. Our findings indicate a sizeable effect for pro-climate voting after experiencing a flood: vote-share supporting pro-climate policies can increase by 20 percent. Our findings contribute to the literature exploring the impact of local conditions on electoral behavior.

Voting for Tomorrow: Climate Change, Environmental Concern, and Green Voting

“…These changes can contribute to shifts in the political landscape at a larger scale, given the increased share of Green voters across countries in Europe in recent years. Our findings are in line with existing case studies on the role of climate experiences for voting behavior providing comparative evidence on the phenomenon and highlighting its broader implications (Baccini and Leemann, 2020;Hazlett and Mildenberger, 2020).…”

“…Kachi et al (2015) argue that awareness of climate change alone does not necessarily translate into support for climate policy. However, very few existing studies have considered the link between direct exposure with extreme weather events or climate anomalies on political behavior (Baccini and Leemann, 2020;Hazlett and Mildenberger, 2020). Our empirical design allows us to causally test for the effects of experiencing climate change on Green voting, which -as we show -are driven in part by changes in environmental concern.…”

Evidence for the irrelevance of irrelevant events

“…Our findings illustrate that concerns about the incompetence of citizens and their capacity to evaluate political performance and make rational voting decisions effectively may be overstated (see also Fowler and Montagnes, 2015a;Wuttke, 2019;Baccini and Leemann, 2021). Irish citizens' opinions' and voting behavior appear unaffected by irrelevant events such as the outcome of sports matches.…”

More Talk, No Action? The Effect of Exposure to Extreme Weather Events on Climate Change Concern and Pro-Environmental Behaviour

“…For instance, carefully designed political interventions with elements of redistribution and immediate benefits might help to increase public support and the likelihood of individual engagement [60]. Combined with the increasing support for green policies due to increasing extreme weather events found elsewhere [18,19], this seems a more promising approach to face the upcoming challenges than expecting individuals to change their behaviour due to experiential learning or localizing of threats.…”

“…One might thus argue that the problem of lacking support for environmental action might 'solve itself' in the near future. Still, most previous conclusions on the impact of extreme weather events are based on cross-sectional designs [16,17,8] or longitudinal methods with geographically aggregated data [18,19], and do not allow to draw conclusions about individual-level behavioural changes. This is an important shortcoming as behavioural changes are crucial for climate change mitigation [20], but the theory of collective action [21,22] predicts strong barriers for behavioural changes even if the individual risk perception increases due to extreme weather events [23,24,25].…”