Flirting with Disaster: Impacts of natural disasters on public support for environmental spending

Abstract

Policymakers must understand public opinion to craft effective policies, particularly in highly polarized areas such as environmental policy. However, the literature investigating the factors that drive public opinion on environmental spending largely ignores the role of exogenous events. This article investigates the role that natural disasters, as a form of exogenous shock, play in shaping public opinion. We construct a dataset using the General Social Survey (GSS) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) natural disaster data from 1980 to 2018 and use generalized ordered logistic models to analyze the relationship between disasters and environmental opinions in the US. Our findings reveal that the number of disasters that occur significantly drives public support for environmental spending and that different types of disaster have heterogeneous impacts with wildfires and severe winter weather events being the most impactful. These results shed light on the impact of environmental events on public opinion on the environment, helping both researchers and policymakers make sense of dynamic public opinions.