Do parties listen to their voters? A major challenge of studying party responsiveness is the interdependence between parties and voters. There may be congruence between parties and voters as parties may have responded to voters, but political parties may have also primed voters in the first place. In this study, we aim to overcome this challenge by exploiting exogenous variation in public opinion. More specifically, we leverage a novel dataset on natural disasters which produce exogenous variation in the salience of environmental issues to voters. We combine this dataset with a newly compiled dataset comprising more than 250,000 press releases from 68 parties across 9 countries between 2010 and 2019. Using supervised learning algorithms, we study party responsiveness dynamically by estimating a dynamic measure of parties’ monthly issue attention to environmental issues. Employing a causal identification strategy leveraging the exogenous nature of natural disasters, we show that there is substantial heterogeneity in how parties react to these exogenous shocks. We demonstrate that there are strategic considerations depending on the electoral cycle and party characteristics influencing the responses to these events. Our results have important implications for our understanding of party competition, political representation and the responsiveness of parties to environmental challenges.