Natural disasters and Green party electoral support

Do natural disasters help Green parties? It is often argued that climate change will increase the number and frequency of natural disasters, and therefore to understand its political consequences becomes particularly relevant. Recent research has shown that to experience natural disasters makes voters more likely to vote progressively on referenda on the environment. In addition, there is a large body of literature on the consequences of natural disasters, showing that incumbents can be punished, and that to experience natural disasters makes voters more aware and progressive on the environment. I argue that combination of these two patterns provides Green parties with a unique electoral opportunity, by putting an issue they tend to own on the agenda and by creating an incentive for protest voting. By compiling a novel dataset combining flood registers and local electoral results from multiple sources, I test this argument by leveraging on the differential exposure to floods in the UK and conduct a difference-in-differences design to identify the impact effect of experiencing floods on the electoral performance of Green parties. I explore the mechanisms underlying my findings by analyzing geo-located panel surveys, recycling data, as well as local party communications and candidate allocation. This paper thus contributes to a better understanding of the politics of climate change and how the behavior of different political actors is shaped by it.