Skogen brinner : Ett naturligt experiment på retrospektiv röstning efter skogsbränderna i Värmland 2018

Sammanfattning: The wildfires of 2018 became one of the most extensive in Sweden’s modern history. The Värmland region was with its forested landscape and highly important forest industry one of the most affected regions in Mid-Sweden. The burnt area had a total range of over 600 square miles corresponding approximately 850 fully sized football fields. Within the scientific literature there haven’t been any former studies on how wildfires affect the retrospective voting mechanism in a representative democracy. The theory of retrospective voting is found under the assumption that voters base their vote on the incumbent’s performance. In the context of natural disasters, voters can choose whether to reward or punish the incumbent for its crisis response. Previous research has empirically proven that crisis response, in event of a natural disaster, can be a crucial element for the outcome of a general election. The purpose of this study has been to investigate if there was a punishment effect on the incumbent party, the Social Democrats, for their crisis response in the Swedish national and local election of 2018 (in the Värmland region). Voters living in more fire-affected municipalities in Värmland is expecting to generate a larger punishment effect than of voters from less effected municipalities. To measure the potential punishment effect individual data from the SOM-institute’s ”Värmlandsundersökning” from 2014 and 2018 has been used to identify a change between the two elections. The methodological approach of this study is a natural experiment as the wild fires were randomized over the region and therefore is expecting to create a variation. To be able to measure a potential difference a multivariate OLS regression analysis with robust standard errors has been used. The result of the study shows no significant punishment effect in the support for the Social Democrats, neither on a national nor on a local level. The voters are rather neutral to the incumbent’s crisis response. One implication of the study is that the support for the Social democrats in the local election follows the trend of former research. The overall conclusion is that the voters in the Värmland region don’t appear to have adopted an equally critical attitude towards the government’s crisis management as the media and the political opposition.