Weathering the Ballot Box: Retrospective Voting and Climate Disasters in Colombia

Do voters hold politicians accountable for climate-related disasters? The retrospective voting theory suggests that citizens hold incumbents accountable for their performance, including their response to climate shocks. Anticipating this, governments allocate disaster relief to reduce electoral backlash-a form of blame avoidance. This paper brings these perspectives together to assess whether disasters erode support for incumbents and whether post-disaster relief offsets electoral losses. Leveraging an original dataset of over 47,000 climate-related disasters in Colombia between 1998 and 2021, combined with municipalitylevel presidential election results, I estimate fixed effects models at the municipality and electoral cycle levels. Results show that disasters significantly reduce incumbent vote share, particularly when they occur within a year before an election and when the number of disasters is high. These effects persist when disasters are interacted with their humanitarian impact and infrastructure damage, indicating that voters respond to the frequency, timing, and severity of shocks. I further examine whether government relief mitigates punishment. While assistance can blunt negative effects, it does so only when disasters are few and occur closer to the election day. These findings suggest that, contrary to expectations of targeted distributive politics, voter responses to disasters reflect a conditional form of electoral accountability shaped by context and the limits of post-disaster policy.