Pro-environmental voting when climate change is made salient: Evidence from high-resolution flooding data

Abstract

Experiencing events such as extreme heat, flooding, or wildfires may affect political preferences and voting patterns, but existing evidence is mixed. Further, although scientists attribute the increasing incidence and severity of these events to climate change, it is typically uncertain whether the public makes this connection and, therefore, the channel leading from extreme weather events to political outcomes remains unclear. Here we consider a setting in which this connection was made very salient. We use high-resolution flooding and building-level damage data to identify spatially finely disaggregated effects of a large flood in Germany on pro-environmental voting. The flood’s destructiveness and temporal proximity to a general election entailed that media and politicians paid significant attention to the flood, drawing a connection to climate change. Our analysis shows that experiencing damage increases pro-environmental voting, suggesting that first-hand experiences of extreme weather events that are attributed to climate change affect political preferences.