‘You might expect citizens to favor parties that take global warming seriously. In the US, the opposite is true’

At the end of an election campaign for a presidential race that is as close as it is decisive for the country’s future, the United States was hit by two devastating climactic catastrophes, hurricanes Helene and Milton, at the end of September and the beginning of October respectively. While the financial costs of these disasters are estimated at several tens of billions of dollars, is it possible to estimate, or anticipate, the political consequences?

Given the scientific consensus on the link between global warming and the multiplication of environmental disasters, the occurrence, let alone the personal experience, of an environmental catastrophe should act as a wake-up call and lead citizens to unite in the desire to combat global warming. And you might expect citizens to favor political parties who take the reality of global warming seriously, and propose solutions to mitigate its human and financial costs.

In the US, however, the opposite is true. On the contrary, the experience of disaster is widening the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats even further (“Experience, Narratives, and Climate Change Beliefs,” Milena Djourelova, Ruben Durante, Elliot Motte and Eleonora Patacchini, SSRN, 2023).

The authors of this paper first conducted an experiment on a small sample of 400 people, broadcasting to 200 Democrats and 200 Republicans a video of damage caused by Hurricane Ian in Florida in 2022, and then asking them about the cause of the hurricane. Confronted with the choice between “climate change” and “nature’s unpredictability,” only 13% of Republicans chose the first option, compared with 62% of Democrats, a 49-point gap between supporters of the two political parties.

The researchers then validated these results using a large-scale survey of over 50,000 people representative of the American population. They compared the responses of people living in the same county in the US and surveyed in the same year, but some of them were spoken to before and some after the occurrence of one of the 2,585 environmental disasters classified as such by the Federal Emergency Management Agency between 2000 and 2021, depending on the random timing of the survey.

Widening partisan differences

Local disaster experience consistently widens partisan differences between Democrats and Republicans. While this experience increases environmental concerns among Democrats by 1.4 to 2.6 percentage points on average, it reduces them among Republicans! The gap widens even further when respondents are asked about the need to combat global warming through public action.

You have 25.7% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.