The Causal Effect of Planned Power Outages on Political Attitudes (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Natural Disasters and the Politics of Infrastructure

Abstract

As adverse events associated with climate change become more common and more severe, it is important to understand how experiencing these events shapes individuals' policy preferences and behaviors. This paper leverages widespread Californian power outages from mid-October 2019 through early November 2019 intended to reduce risk of wildfire ignition. These outages affected about 600,000 customers and caused major disruptions to normal activities among affected households. We leverage these outages as a natural experiment to investigate how experience with an outage–as a tangible hazard and climate adaptation-related event–shaped risk perceptions, policy preferences, and behavior.

We surveyed addresses across California through a spatially explicit survey and matching design that oversampled individuals living on either side of outage boundaries. The resulting survey (n=890) allows us to better estimate the causal effects of exposure to planned power outages. We find that exposure to outages had sizable and statistically significant effects on individual-level adaptation measures like plans to install backup generation. Exposure also affected respondents' attitudes towards their electric utility, for instance, lowering levels of trust. However, we do not find that exposure to outages affected climate and clean energy policy attitudes. Findings contribute to a growing literature on the individual-level implications of climate-related events

Authors

• Matto Mildenberger, University of California Santa Barbara

• Leah Stokes, UCSB

• Sam Trachtman, University of California, Berkeley

• Mark N. Lubell, University of California, Davis