Extreme Weather and Electoral Clientelism in Honduras

The changing climate is leading to more frequent weather extremes across the globe, and this is altering many aspects of social, economic and political life. This paper will examine the impact of extreme weather on clientelism, a form of particularistic exchange in which voters are induced to eschew policy-oriented electoral decision-making in favour of voting for a party or candidate that offers them an individual reward. We hypothesize that extreme weather should increase clientelism in contexts where it operates, and that this effect should work via both supply-side and demand-side channels. We test our expectations on recent quantitative and qualitative data from Honduras. We analyse data from the 2018 LAPOP survey to probe clientelism assessments of the 2017 general election by means of both coarsened exact matching and an unexpected event in survey design (UESD). This analysis is supplemented with original qualitative data from interviews with Honduran political party officials, civil society members, aid workers and academic experts about the role of post-flood disaster relief in shaping electoral clientelism.