Global Harms, Local Profits: How the Uneven Costs of Natural Disasters Affect Support for Green Political Platforms

Abstract

As the climate crisis worsens, it becomes increasingly important to understand how voters respond to first-hand experience of natural disasters. Conventional wisdom holds that exposure to natural disasters fosters environmental concern, thereby increasing support for green parties and candidates. Looking at the impact of wildfires on voting behavior in Brazil, we argue instead that exposure to natural disasters increases support for green candidates only when the costs of disasters outweigh their benefits. While fires have unambiguously negative environmental and health effects, their economic implications are not necessarily negative. In areas where fires destroy natural vegetation, newly ``cleared'' land may represent an opportunity for land grabbing and the expansion of agricultural and livestock production. We source satellite, administrative, and electoral data from Brazil and use it in two different identification strategies. Our results show that exposure to fires increases support for the main green candidate only in municipalities with low shares of employment in sectors that are likely to benefit from the degradation of the natural environment. Our findings shed light on the distributional implications of environmental degradation and their political consequences.

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

“…Future research could investigate which of several mechanisms might be driving this phenomenon. If voters in severely impacted areas suffered economically, it could be valuable to consider whether increases in support for climate action are likely only to happen under favourable economic conditions (Hoffmann et al, 2022; Pianta and Rettl, 2022). Perhaps increases in Green vote share in severely affected areas are smaller in part because voters in these areas respond to effective flood relief by rewarding incumbent parties.…”

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

“…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).…”