Disaster Exposure and Political Participation

Exposure to a natural disaster is often a traumatic experience that can have long-term consequences on several aspects in life, such as one’s personal health (Arnberg et.al. 2015). However, the effects of natural disaster exposure on political behavior are much less clear. In this paper, we ask whether exposure to a natural disaster affects individuals’ political participation? Theoretically, two influential mechanisms have been proposed to explain electoral behavior in the wake of a natural disaster: persuasion and mobilization. The mechanism of persuasion focuses on voters’ evaluation of the incumbent’s government crisis response and how this affects their vote choice (Bechtel & Hainmueller 2011; Eriksson 2016). In this paper, however, we focus on the second of the two mechanisms, namely mobilization. Specifically, this mechanism posits that natural disasters may have an impact on elections either by demobilizing or mobilizing voters. While some have hypothesized that turnout will increase in the wake of natural disasters, as the incumbent’s crisis response may cause new voters to go to the polls (Fair et.al 2017), others have hypothesized a dampening effect, because of the economic and emotional consequences of natural disasters (e.g., Rudolph & Kuhn 2018). Despite having made great strides in the last decade or so, the literature has yet been able to provide conclusive evidence on the impact disaster exposure may have on political participation, which makes the mechanisms that drive political behavior following a disaster not too well understood. Unlike previous work in the area, which is all based on aggregate election data, our article presents the first large-scale individual-level study of the impact of natural disasters on political participation. To do this, we rely on two data sources. First, we utilize unique and detailed individual-level administrative data of approximately 16,000 Swedish survivors of the 2004 Boxing Day-tsunami, that hit South-East Asia in 2004. We match this data against other individuals in the entire Swedish population registry on several pre-tsunami characteristics, allowing us to better isolate the effect of disaster exposure on two measures of political participation – electoral turnout and political candidacy. In this way, we are able to more thoroughly investigate what may drive electoral behavior related to post-disaster turnout, while also extending existing scholarship by including political candidacy as a novel measurement of political participation in disaster contexts. Second, we also administer a survey to 10,000 individuals in our data (half of which were exposed to the tsunami), allowing for more nuanced long-term measures of political engagement, such as internal and external political efficacy, and control variables including measures of social capital and exposure severity. In combination, these data allow us to study the effects of natural disasters on political participation in a completely novel and unique way.  References: Arnberg FK, Gudmundsdottir R, Butwicka A, Fang F, Lichtenstein P, Hultman CM and Valdimarsdottir UA (2015) Psychiatric disorders and suicide attempts in Swedish survivors of the 2004 southeast Asia tsunami: a 5 year matched cohort study. Lancet Psychiatry, 2(9), 817- 24