Disaster Experience Mitigates the Partisan Divide on Climate Change

• In Event: Disaster Politics: Networks, Narratives, Experiences, and Perceptions (Virtual Session)

Abstract

Partisan beliefs about anthropogenic climate change continue to divide public opinion in the U.S., and support for climate change mitigation policies is similarly polarized along partisan lines. Entrenched partisan beliefs are difficult to change, but they are not fixed. Drawing on work that shows the public's outlook on climate change responds to weather patterns, we investigate the role of exposure to environmental disasters in mitigating the partisan divide on beliefs and policy preferences surrounding climate change. To do so, we conducted a two-wave panel survey among Texas residents in 2020 and 2021, the first wave after the 2017 Hurricane Harvey and the second wave after the 2021 winter storms. Initial results show that the partisan divide on beliefs and policy opinions about climate change is smaller among individuals who reported to have experienced severe personal damage from the two disasters compared to less impacted individuals. A difference-in-differences analysis using power outage data in winter 2021 shows similar results. This observed reduction in partisan divide is largely attributable to impacted Republicans, who tend to hold more pro-climate positions than non-impacted ones. On the other hand, Democrats' positions on climate policies do not vary with extreme climate experience. This suggests that the implementation of extreme whether mitigation strategies may become less politically salient as the frequency of lived experiences with extreme climate events increases; whereas the views about the general causes of climate change are not likely to change via this lived experience mechanism.

Authors

• Ted Hsuan Yun Chen, George Mason University

• Christopher J. Fariss, University of Michigan

• Hwayong Shin, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Xu Xu, Princeton University