The votes are burning : A natural experiment on the effect of the Swedish wildfires on the 2018 national election to the Swedish parliament

Abstract: This thesis examines the Swedish wildfires 2018 and their effect on the voting patterns in the national election the same year. With a departure point from the field of voting behaviour and electoral studies, it follows the theory of retrospective voting. Building on the previous research of retrospective voting in the context of natural disasters, this thesis contributes to the field with the case of the Swedish wildfires 2018 and government’s crisis response that followed. The crisis concerned a great deal of the population and was geographically widely spread. Additionally, international aid was needed to control the aggressive fires. The main actor ultimately responsible for the crisis response was the government, which also became the main target for criticism. By using the design of a natural experiment and analysing the Swedish municipalities’ relative burned area and the change in vote shares for the government parties, through the method of regression analyses, the results show that the electorate did punish the government in the following election to the Swedish parliament. More precise, the reached conclusion is that the electorate punished the government to the extent of a decrease with 6.246 percentage points in the government’s vote shares for each percentage point higher relative burned area. Moreover, it was the Social Democratic Party that was punished, holding a vast majority of the minister posts, and not the other part of the government coalition, the Green Party. This suggests support for the retrospective voting theories, that the electorate does hold the government accountable by evaluating their actions and either punishes or rewards it based on the outcomes of their actions.