Engagement and Events

Do natural disasters affect electoral accountability, and do these effects differ by the gender of the elected official? While previous research has shown that voters often punish incumbents for exogenous shocks beyond their control, scholars have overlooked potential differences in electoral punishment based on politicians' gender. Drawing on existing literature on gender stereotypes and role congruence theory, I argue that female incumbents may experience more pronounced electoral backlash than their male counterparts in municipalities affected by typhoons. To test this argument, I analyze ten years of data on municipal-level typhoon affectedness and mayoral elections in the Philippines. Using a two-way fixed-effects regression model, I examine the long-term, average magnitude of typhoon affectedness over one, two, and three years within each mayoral tenure. I find that female incumbents experience more pronounced electoral backlash than their male counterparts in municipalities that sustain higher typhoon exposure. Specifically, female incumbents lose significantly more in vote shares compared to male incumbents across different time frames of typhoon affectedness within their mayoral terms. These findings contribute to our understanding of electoral accountability and gender bias in politics by demonstrating how natural disasters may reinforce traditional gender stereotypes and disproportionately impact the electoral performance of women. The study also extends the literature on retrospective voting to include gender considerations and provides insights from a non-Western context.

China’s approach to environmental regulation relies heavily on campaign-style enforcement and blunt-force regulation. While considered effective in the short run, this approach is often inefficient and generates unintended regulatory outcomes in the longer run. At the same time, China continues to experiment with the use of market-based approaches that are theoretically more efficient and have the potential to facilitate sustained reductions in carbon emissions. Arguably the most high-profile example is the Guangdong Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which was launched in 2013 as a national pilot scheme. We construct a synthetic control of Guangdong and analyze 51,076 party-led newspaper reports to show that while the ETS reduced emissions in the short run, these reductions were systematically associated with political signaling. Our findings suggest that current market-based approaches in China may not be qualitatively different from more direct forms of environmental regulation.

Are attitudes towards climate change and climate change policies affected by climate events? During the last decade, a fair amount of research on climate change has been devoted to understanding the extent to which attitudes towards climate change and related policies are affected by climate disasters or extreme weather. However, research has often focused on single case studies and, not surprisingly, the evidence is far from consistent. In this article, we analyse public opinion on climate change and climate policies as a function of objective changes in floods, fire or hurricane occurrence, among others. We employ several empirical strategies. First, we use fine-grained geographic data from the American Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and interpolate it with the survey data from the Cooperative Election Study (CES). Second, we exploit the panel structure of some CES modules and examine within-level changes in support of climate change policies. Finally, we rely on a quasi-experimental design and all climate change events that occurred during the survey fieldwork and conduct an Unexpected Event during Survey Design (UESD). Our results show that on average extreme events do not affect climate beliefs or support for pro-environmental policies. If anything, conservative individuals become less reluctant to climate when big natural disasters occur. Our findings have implications for our understanding of how real climate events affect people’s willingness to support climate change policies.

Why do some Americans support government aid after natural disasters while others demand self-reliance?  In the context of the American liberal welfare regime, where norms of individual responsibility and skepticism toward redistribution run deep, natural disasters pose a unique question: they are negative shocks that appear random and unavoidable, yet public support for government intervention in their aftermath remains inconsistent.  Using Hurricanes Helene and Milton (October 2024) as focal points, this paper examines the factors shaping U.S. public opinion on government assistance. Drawing on an original survey and conjoint experiment, we find that while general redistribution preferences lean toward individual responsibility, attitudes toward specific natural disasters tend to diverge, with respondents showing stronger support for government aid to victims of Helene, Milton, and Katrina.  Support increases when disasters are perceived as severe, unpredictable, and the result of bad luck, while partisanship and racialized perceptions of impacted communities temper this support.  Democrats consistently favor more aid than Republicans, particularly for Black-impacted communities, while Republicans favor aid to primarily white communities. Unexpectedly, personal disaster experience is associated with reduced support for government intervention.  These findings offer broader implications for redistributive politics as climate change accelerates the frequency and scope of natural disasters, challenging existing policy frameworks and public sentiment toward government intervention in crises.

Green industrial policy is an increasingly common tool for states seeking to reach mid-century decarbonization targets. Whereas existing explanations of firm climate preferences largely focus on regulation, explanations for assistance lie at the sector level. I argue that a firm's geographic concentration, by increasing the potential proximate benefits that a firm can accrue following expansions to the green assistance budget, increases the likelihood a firm directly lobbies on green industrial policy. Assistance budget expansions make feasible transformational decarbonization projects, large enough to spillover to multiple firms in a given area, hence those firms that are most concentrated to other firms stand to gain the most. Using French lobbying data, I assess how manufacturing firms responded to the expansion of green assistance as a part of the COVID-19 stimulus policy: France Relance. Using this exogenous funding shock in a difference-in-differences design, I find that more concentrated firms increasingly lobby on green industrial policy. This finding holds when I consider intra-industry heterogeneity in concentration with more concentrated firms increasingly lobbying alone. These results suggest that firm behavior towards green assistance is structured by a geographic rather than based on sector- or emissions intensity-based cleavage.

This paper examines how firms’ supply chain relationships influence their political stances toward carbon tariffs, specifically the EU’s newly implemented Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). I argue that firms sourcing from suppliers in states with advanced carbon emission regulations are more likely to support CBAM, as they can benefit from exemptions or reduced tariffs while imposing additional costs on competitors relying on suppliers from states with limited carbon regulations. Conversely, firms with suppliers from states with few regulations are more likely to oppose CBAM due to increased import costs. Using firm-level supply chain data and political activity records from the EU Transparency Register, I empirically analyze whether reliance on suppliers from states with different levels of emission regulatory stringency shapes EU-based firms’ support or opposition to CBAM and related legislation. Text analysis techniques are also applied to firms’ submitted documents during the EU’s public consultation to determine their stances.

Scientific research has been considered a primary source of information for improving policy outcomes, but its use is inevitably intertwined with political considerations. Using a comprehensive dataset of peer-reviewed journal articles evaluated for the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, this paper examines the trade-off between partisan bias and evidence quality in the use of science for environmental regulations. I find that the integration of science into policymaking is guided by a pursuit of expertise but is biased in favor of the presidential administration. This work not only provides an empirical examination of long-standing questions about how information is used by politically divergent factions but also illuminates the pathways through which academic research connects to the contours of evidence-based policymaking.

Does investment in telecommunications infrastructure support the spread of knowledge about climate change in Africa? While developing countries are among the most vulnerable to climate impacts, knowledge about climate change remains variable across the region. We predict that infrastructure investments which expand access to high speed internet will encourage the spread of climate knowledge. These effects will be largest for those who are traditionally deprived of easy access to political information: those residing in rural areas or with little formal education, and in less democratic environments. We provide causal evidence for these claims using geolocated data from the seventh wave of the Afrobarometer. We employ a difference-in-differences design leveraging geospatial data on the availability of high speed Internet induced by completion of new terrestrial fibre-optic backbone cables. As predicted expansion of high speed internet promotes climate literacy and does so disproportionately among citizens in rural areas, with little formal education, and in less democratic settings.

Green industrial policy has gained prominence as a more politically feasible strategy for rapid decarbonization compared to conventional climate policies like carbon pricing. We build on insights from retrospective voting models to theorize the electoral effects of green industrial policy. We then analyze the effect of the US Inflation Reduction Act(IRA) -- a recent and far-reaching green industrial policy -- on Democratic vote share in the 2024 presidential election. Using a difference-in-differences research design with entropy balancing, we compare counties that receive IRA-induced private sector investment to observationally similar counties that do not receive investment.

This paper focuses on an important aspect of the energy transition in the context of South Asia – the transition to electric mobility. It employs a detailed case study of the introduction of an electric vehicle (EV) policy in Pakistan, a country of 220 million with a rapidly rising automobile ownership rate, to ask what factors determined the scope and implementation of the policy. Employing process tracing, it tracks the evolution of the policy over the span of two years to show how (i) even in cases of industry-government coordination, challengers can mount a policy offensive by building coalitions with non-industry actors and strategically choosing their policy forums, and (ii) established incumbents can retaliate and limit the scope of proposed policies, but struggle to remove them from the agenda entirely once they’re on the discussion table. The case study contributes to our understanding of the politics of the energy transition in emerging and developing country contexts.

Thursday 5th December

Climate Change, Political Conflict, and Democratic Resilience
Austin Beacham (Georgia Institue of Technology), Christina J. Schneider (UCSD), and Emilie M. Hafner-Burton (UCSD)    

Chasing the Sun: The Political Economy of Solar Industry Investment in the Global South
Ishana Ratan (UC Berkeley)

Thursday 21st November

Towards an environmental welfare state? Protecting populations against environmental risks and disasters in the age of the climate crisis.
Lydie Cabane (Leiden University) and Anne Laure Beaussier (Sciences Po)     

The Role of Social Protection for a Just Transition in Developing and Emerging Economies
Katrin Gasior (Southern African Social Policy Research Insights)     

Thursday 24th October

Does Warm Weather Cool Voters Down? How Temperature Fluctuations Impact Voting and Climate Concerns
Maria Cotofan (King's College London) Karly Kuralbayeva (King's College London), and Konstantinos Matakos (King's College London and Harvard)

Measuring Climate Change Salience in Political Manifestos: A Computational Text Analysis Approach
Mary Sanford (RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment)

Thursday 7th November

More than Symbols : The Effect of Symbolic Policies on Climate Policy Support
Théodore Tallent (Sciences Po), Malo Jan (Sciences Po), and Luis Sattelmayer (Sciences Po)

Cost, Risk, and Threat: The Material & Contextual Factors Driving Climate Policy Preferences
Max Bradley (EUI)- Max Bradley will present in person at 5.00pm.