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Wildfire Exposure Increases Pro-Environment Voting within Democratic but Not Republican Areas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2020

CHAD HAZLETT Open the ORCID record for CHAD HAZLETT [Opens in a new window]  and
MATTO MILDENBERGER Open the ORCID record for MATTO MILDENBERGER [Opens in a new window]
CHAD HAZLETT*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
MATTO MILDENBERGER*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
*
Chad Hazlett, Assistant Professor, Departments of Political Science and Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles, chazlett@ucla.edu.
Matto Mildenberger, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, mildenberger@ucsb.edu
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Abstract

One political barrier to climate reforms is the temporal mismatch between short-term policy costs and long-term policy benefits. Will public support for climate reforms increase as climate-related disasters make the short-term costs of inaction more salient? Leveraging variation in the timing of Californian wildfires, we evaluate how exposure to a climate-related hazard influences political behavior rather than self-reported attitudes or behavioral intentions. We show that wildfires increased support for costly, climate-related ballot measures by 5 to 6 percentage points for those living within 5 kilometers of a recent wildfire, decaying to near zero beyond a distance of 15 kilometers. This effect is concentrated in Democratic-voting areas, and it is nearly zero in Republican-dominated areas. We conclude that experienced climate threats can enhance willingness-to-act but largely in places where voters are known to believe in climate change.

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Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 1359 - 1365
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

Authors are listed in alphabetical order and contributed equally. Thanks to Johannes Urpelainen, M. Kent Jennings, Peter Howe, Leah Stokes, Paasha Mahdavi, Jennifer Marlon, Parrish Bergquist, participants at the Environmental Politics & Governance workshop, the American Political Science Association conference, the UC Santa Barbara Environmental Politics Workshop, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Corresponding author: mildenberger@ucsb.edu. Replication materials are available on the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OVEGLS.

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