Climate Change and Political Behavior in the Global South - Livestream

As climate volatility becomes more extreme, so too will its destabilizing impact on politics. Yet we know relatively little about its effects on voting behavior, particularly in the developing world, and even less about downstream effects on the reputation of candidates and political institutions. Exploring the mechanisms behind these effects is also difficult due to a lack of data with the spatial and temporal resolution necessary for credible subnational analysis.

Here, we provide some of the first large-scale evidence on climate volatility’s effect on several measures of political accountability by combining several sources of survey data with high-resolution meteorological and climatic data. We also utilize a novel source of subnational economic data generated by combining remote sensing data with a convolutional neural network to generate annual, high-resolution estimates of growth at the 1x1km level for all of Africa. This ML-generated measure is a considerable improvement over nightlights-based alternatives and permits credible mediation analysis linking negative political outcomes to climate volatility through reductions in economic growth. We supplement our focus on Africa with companion estimates from Latin America, exploiting variation in national-level institutions to examine whether they can explain the substantial effect heterogeneity we observe in our reduced-form results.

Speaker: Amanda Kennard, Stanford University; Brandon de la Cuesta, Stanford University