Climate change adaptation and the management of socio-natural disasters have become routine tasks of government at every level, and a growing body of research asks whether voters hold politicians accountable for how well they perform these tasks. Conceived through a principal-agent lens, electoral accountability requires that citizens observe and reward or sanction incumbent performance. Yet the visibility of government action differs sharply across contexts: long-term climate adaptation policies are often low-salience and hard for voters to evaluate, while short-term disaster response is highly visible, immediate, and personally costly, offering a distinctive test of accountability logics that most existing research, focused largely on corruption and national governments, has not addressed.
This panel pushes the methodological frontier of causal inference in this literature. We invite papers using experimental and quasi-experimental designs, including regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences, randomized information campaigns, and other identification strategies, to study how voters respond to the adoption of climate adaptation measures and to the management of environmental disasters, particularly at the subnational and local level, where mayors are increasingly responsible for reallocating spending and distributing aid. We welcome contributions examining questions such as: do voters reward local authorities who adopt climate adaptation plans despite their cost or low visibility; do incumbents face an electoral penalty or bonus following floods, fires, or other disasters; how does shock timing relative to elections shape accountability; and whether gender or other incumbent characteristics condition these effects.
The panel aims to advance a comparative research agenda beyond single-country, national-level analyses, welcoming papers that push methodological boundaries from different institutional and geographic contexts, methodological traditions, and career stages.
