Extreme Weather Events and the Politics of Climate Change Attribution

About this event

Climate change is a global problem with local consequences. These consequences are becoming increasingly manifest, in the form of wildfires, hurricanes, and severe flooding. As the science linking these disasters to climate change has grown more robust, it has led to increased pressure on politicians to acknowledge this connection. While an analysis of Congressional press releases reveals a slight increase in willingness to link extreme weather events to climate change in the past decade, particularly among Democrats, many politicians remain hesitant to do so. Why? We hypothesize that climate change attribution can backfire by undermining politicians' ability to respond to the visible manifestations of climate change. We conduct an original survey experiment on a representative sample of American adults in order to show how linking natural disasters to climate change adversely affects Republican respondents’ perceptions of their elected representatives' ability to address weather-related disasters as well as these respondents' willingness to back efforts to protect against such disasters in the future. Our findings shed new light on the potential trade-offs of conveying the link between climate change and its devastating consequences.

Rebecca Perlman is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her primary field of research is international political economy, with a focus on international regulatory politics and the governance of multinational firms. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Legal Analysis. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton University.

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