This paper investigates how repeated exposure to natural disasters shapes voters’ attitudes towards environmental issues. Prior research offers conflicting findings on whether climate change related weather events have the potential to influence environmental attitudes and behaviours. I theorize that these discrepancies arise from differences in individuals' climate change risk perceptions depending on whether they perceive their exposure to natural disasters as temporary or systemic.
Using panel and cross-sectional data from the German Longitudinal Electoral Study (GLES) and the EM-DAT International Disaster Database, this study employs mixed-effects generalized linear models to estimate the impact of disaster exposure across varying time frames.
The results indicate that, while natural disasters generally increase the salience of environmental issues, the effect of long-term systemic exposure differs from short-term temporary exposure. Specifically, persistent exposure over extended periods leads voters to prioritize addressing climate change over economic growth. Conversely, short-term exposure shifts preferences toward economic growth, reflecting a difference in perceived costs associated with systemic versus temporary exposure to natural disasters.
This study advances our understanding of how natural disaster exposure influences political attitudes by introducing a novel framework to differentiate between short- and long-term risk patterns. It sheds light on the role of temporary and systemic exposure to climate change-related events on environmental policy preferences, contributing to theoretical and methodological debates in political psychology and environmental studies.