Backing the incumbent in difficult times: the electoral impact of wildfires

Roberto Ramos and Carlos Sanz

No 1810, Working Papers from Banco de España

Abstract: How do voters react to large shocks that are (mostly) outside the control of politicians? We address this question by studying the electoral effects of wildfires in Spain during 1983-2011. Using a difference-in-difference strategy, we find that a large accidental fire up to nine months ahead of a local election increases the incumbent party’s vote share by almost 8 percentage points. We find that a rally-behind-the-leader effect best explains the results. A simple formalization of this mechanism yields an implication – that the effect should be larger for stronger (more voted) incumbents – that is supported by the data.

Keywords: voting behavior; rally behind the leader; difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2018-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bde.es/f/webbde/SES/Secciones/Publicac ... 18/Files/dt1810e.pdf First version, March 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bde:wpaper:1810

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Banco de España Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ángel Rodríguez. Electronic Dissemination of Information Unit. Research Department. Banco de España ().