Weathering the Ballot Box: Climate Disasters Response and Electoral Behavior in Colombia

Do voters hold politicians accountable for climate-related disasters? Existing research offers competing explanations: some argue that voters punish incumbents for poor disaster management, others emphasize the electoral rewards of effective relief, and still others highlight contextual conditions—such as disaster timing and intensity—that moderate these effects. This paper develops and tests a conditional accountability framework that integrates these perspectives, arguing that the political consequences of disasters depend jointly on disaster exposure and the credibility of government response. Using a novel dataset of over 47,000 climate-related disasters in Colombia (1998–2021), linked to municipality-level presidential election results, I estimate fixed-effects models capturing within-municipality and within-cycle variation in disaster exposure and relief. The results show that disasters generally reduce incumbent vote share when they are severe or occur close to elections, but that timely and visible relief can partially offset these effects. These findings unify competing theories of disaster politics and show how accountability under climate stress depends on the interaction between citizen evaluation and government strategy.