Natural disasters and political beliefs

This paper examines whether local exposure to extreme weather affects support for national climate and energy policies in Switzerland. We construct a municipality-referendum panel linking high-resolution MeteoSwiss data on extreme heat and intense precipitation to municipal voting outcomes in federal referenda. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design and Callaway–Sant’Anna event-study estimators, we compare municipalities first exposed to extreme weather shocks with not-yet-treated municipalities. The results provide little evidence that extreme weather increases support for environmental policy. If anything, the estimates point in the opposite direction: in selected rainfall specifications, environmental yes-shares decline by around 2.7–2.8 percentage points after extreme shocks. These estimates are based on small, geographically concentrated treated cohorts and should therefore be interpreted as cohort-specific. The findings are consistent with the view that salient local shocks may reduce willingness to support costly environmental policies, rather than producing experience-based updating in favor of climate action.