Citizens and local governments response to adverse shocks: the role of politics, elections and media salience

Societies in representative democracies deal with a large set of environmental and transportation risks of shocks. Public intervention serves the purpose of integrating and replacing the role of market institutions by providing different forms of intervention in the presence of adverse shocks. Within representative democracies incumbent politicians might especially care about tackling troublesome situations like floods or fatal road accidents whose solutions are more visible, since this would imply a higher probability of being perceived by voters as competent/committed and thus of being re-elected in office. The visibility effect is enhanced by the level of media coverage.
In this project, we first aim at studying local governments policy making in two of their key functions – environmental protection and road maintenance – focusing on their response to adverse shocks (floods and fatal road accidents). In particular, we investigate how the policy response to floods influences turnout and citizens’ “voice” in the Hirschmann sense, i.e., the decision to vote for the incumbent or for the challenger in case of unsatisfactory policy action(s), or with “exit”, i.e., by voting with feet and moving to other municipalities in search of better opportunities. Moreover, we dig in the policy response to fatal road accidents investigating the impact on the decision to vote for the incumbent and on the voters’ turnout. In both cases the schedule of elections should be relevant in determining the results. The salience of adverse local events in a risky environment (flood and fatal road accidents) often crucially depends on the amount of coverage devoted to them by the mass media. In fact, we study the role of media coverage in determining the impact of a given shock on the local policy and voters’ response as a function of the measurable lack of national and international salient news.