If not now, when? Climate disaster and the Green vote following the 2021 Germany floods

Abstract

Can first-hand experience of a climate-related natural disaster make citizens more likely to vote in favour of progressive climate politics? Leveraging the rare occurrence of a large-scale disaster just two months before a federal election, we use a difference-in-differences design to study the short-term electoral effects of the devastating 2021 Germany floods on voter support for Germany’s major environmentalist party, the Green Party. Compared to other German voters, those living in areas affected by the floods were marginally (0.4–1.6 percentage points) more likely to vote for the Greens. The largest increases in Green vote share are observed in municipalities which were directly exposed to flooding. Contrary to expectation, we tend to find larger increases in Green Party support in the less severely affected areas. Despite substantial increases in turnout in affected areas, we find that the observed increase in vote share for the Greens was rather driven by a persuasion effect on voters who previously supported other parties. In the absence of evidence that the floods led to an increase in voters’ issue prioritisation of climate change, our results highlight the limited possibility for major natural disasters to induce increased localised support for Green parties.

The perceived potential of religion in mitigating climate change and how this is being realized in Germany and Switzerland

“…In addition, the impact of social movements such as Fridays for Future have been substantial with a recent study indicating that environmental concern and behaviour have been positively influenced with behavior changes reported even among those that are sceptical of the climate change movement (Fritz et al 2023 ). In the case of Germany, the catastrophic flooding in 2021 had a noticeable effect on votes in favor of climate progressive parties (Garside and Zhai 2022 ), and the Green Party’s share of votes increased from 8.8% in 2017 to 14.8% in 2021 indicating broader societal tendencies towards increased environmentalism. In light of this, religious environmental engagement in both countries appears to be relatively low (in comparison to the broader societal engagement in the two countries), leading us to infer that much of the assumed potential of religion remains as yet unrealized.…”

Voting and Climate Change: How an Extreme Weather Event Increased Support for a Radical-Right Incumbent in Italy

“…Baccini and Leemann (2021) show that support for environmental policies in Swiss referendums is higher in areas hit by floods (but cf. Garside and Zhai 2022;Hilbig and Riaz 2023;Valentim 2022). We call this first prediction the environmental concern effect.…”

“…First, the granular variation in storm consequences, which was plausibly exogenous to electoral behavior, allows us to add to a recent set of political science studies assessing the political consequences of climate-related disasters and extreme weather events (e.g., Egan and Mullin 2012;Bergquist and Warshaw 2019;Baccini and Leemann 2021;Hoffmann et al 2022;Valentim 2022) using stringent causal identification. Second, the timing and the clear trade-off created by the supply side of the EP election provides us with an ideal setting to assess environmentalist against incumbency effects, an opportunity that does not always occur in conjunction with causal identification (e.g., Hilbig and Riaz 2023;Garside and Zhai 2022). Finally, by showing how damage relief prevails over environmentalist effects in an area whose socioeconomic characteristics may be considered ideal for the activation of environmentalist voting (Inglehart 1971), we generate cumulative evidence that improves our understanding of the conditions under which exposure to climate change translates into environmentalist support (Bechtel, Genovese, and Scheve 2019;Bush and Clayton 2023;Hazlett and Mildenberger 2020;Pianta and Rettl 2022).…”

Personal Experience and Self-Interest: Diverging Responses to Global Warming

“…How does personal experience with climate change affect the public's concern about the issue and support for government policies to mitigate emissions? Some scholars find that experience with extreme heat and disasters cause a modest increase in public concern about global warming (Bergquist and Warshaw 2019;Konisky, Hughes, and Kaylor 2016;Egan and Mullin 2012;Arias and Blair 2024), which may also influence voting (Hazlett and Mildenberger 2020;Hoffmann et al 2022;Baccini and Leemann 2021;Garside and Zhai 2022), trust in institutions (Balcazar and Kennard 2023), and elite behavior (Clark and Zucker 2023). However, others find little relationship between experience and attitudes or voting for green parties (Bechtel and Mannino 2023;Hilbig and Riaz 2023), as summarized in an influential review of 73 papers (Howe et al 2019).…”