Do votes for green parties increase after heat spells?
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskGlobal temperatures are already rising fast. Even if today’s weather extremes may look mild by future standards, they are still more severe than those of the past. In theory, unusual weather events like dry or warm spells might have a silver lining: providing a wake-up call to complacent voters.
To test the link between weather and environmentalism, the authors compiled data on wildfires, droughts, floods and temperatures in 1,239 European administrative areas in 1994-2019. They also tracked two measures of public concern about the environment: responses from a long-running European survey, and the performance in European Parliament elections of green parties, whose voters tend to be particularly focused on climate change.
The researchers found that unusual weather, particularly in the form of heat, did focus people’s minds on climate. The more unseasonably warm days in a given region during the year preceding a poll or European election, the more people in that area said that they were concerned about the environment, and the greater the share of votes green parties went on to win. The same was true of droughts, and to a lesser degree of wildfires.
The impact of other types of weather was much less clear. Cold snaps did seem to help green parties, but to a lesser degree. Extreme wet periods had little effect. And green parties may in fact have fared worse in elections following floods . The authors speculate that use of the specific term “global warming” rather than the broader “climate change” may prevent the public from attributing weather events other than heatwaves or droughts to human activity.
Even high-temperature episodes do not consistently strengthen environmentalism. Instead, the effect is limited to specific contexts. It is greatest in the temperate and colder regions of northern and western Europe, and mostly absent in the arid Mediterranean basin. One possible explanation is that southern Europeans are already used to hot weather, and may be less perturbed by extreme heatwaves. They are also more likely to have air conditioning.
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