Natural disasters and voter gratitude: What is the role of prevention policies?
Carla Morvan and
Sonia Paty
No 2310, Working Papers from Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon
Abstract:
Natural disasters and related prevention policies can affect voter decisions. In this study, we analyze how the occurrence of natural disasters changes voters’ behavior at municipal elections and how prevention policies can mitigate the impact of such catastrophic events on budget accounts and might potentially be rewarded by citizens in upcoming elections. We exploit original data on French municipalities where incumbents sought reelection between 2008 and 2020. To estimate the probability of re-election at the municipal level in the event of a natural disaster we apply a Heckman model based strategy to avoid selection bias. We find that the occurrence of natural disasters significantly decreases the chances of reelection of incumbent mayors. However, although we show that natural hazard prevention plans significantly mitigate the impact of catastrophic events on budget accounts, citizens do not reward such prevention policies in upcoming elections. We confirm the hypothesis of myopia: voters reward incumbents for delivering investment spending or decreasing debt but not for investing in spending on disaster preparedness.
Keywords: Elections; natural disasters; prevention policies; natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-env, nep-eur, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.gate.cnrs.fr/RePEc/2023/2310.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Natural disasters and voter gratitude: What is the role of prevention policies? (2024) 
Working Paper: Natural disasters and voter gratitude: What is the role of prevention policies? (2024)
Working Paper: Natural disasters and voter gratitude: What is the role of prevention policies? (2024)
Working Paper: Natural disasters and voter gratitude: What is the role of prevention policies? (2024)
Working Paper: Natural disasters and voter gratitude: What is the role of prevention policies? (2023) 
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:gat:wpaper:2310
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nelly Wirth ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).