Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Disastrous Voting, Moritz Peter Rissmann

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The central question of this study is ’Is there an observable general trend of electorates punishing incumbents for natural disasters across countries and elections?’ Many scholars have argued for the existence of such behavior, yet the empirical evidence rests mostly on single-country and even single-election studies. I look for a generalizable trend in two original data sets with country-election and country-constituency-election as the unit of analysis respectively. I test the punishment hypothesis by correlating the occurrence of natural disasters to the performance of incumbent parties in national lower house elections. Furthermore, I propose that the effect of natural disasters on …