Extreme weather events do not increase political parties' environmental attention

Abstract

Exposure to extreme weather events can make people more aware of environmental changes; however, it remains unclear how such events influence politicians’ behaviour. Combining supervised learning algorithms on over 260,000 press releases by European parties with a difference-in-differences design, we find that apart from Green parties, extreme weather events do not increase attention towards environmental issues. This suggests the consequences of climate change might not directly increase political attention.