Natural disasters are good examples of catastrophic events that may affect vote decisions. In this study, we analyze how the occurrence of earthquakes changes voters' behavior at municipal elections and which channels drive this change, focusing in particular on the role of media exposure. We exploit data from 13,338 municipal electoral cycles where incumbents seek reelection between 1993 and 2015 in Italy. We apply a difference-in-difference strategy with time and cities fixed effect to the probability of reelection and vote share using three different control groups: the universe of municipalities, a sub-sample of neighboring municipalities, and a sub-sample of municipalities identified by a one-to-one nearest-neighbor propensity score matching procedure. We find that the occurrence of destructive earthquakes significantly increases the incumbent mayors’ chance of being reelected and their vote share. We argue that this result is driven by the incumbent mayor advantage in offering recovery from disaster damages combined with a higher visibility on the media in the aftermath of the disaster. Thus, the mediatic relevance of earthquake occurrence may bias voters towards the incumbent.

自然灾害是可能影响投票决定的灾难性事件的很好例证。在这项研究中，我们分析了地震的发生如何改变选民在市政选举中的行为，以及哪些渠道推动了这一变化，尤其着重于媒体曝光的作用。我们利用了13,338个市政选举周期的数据，在位议员要求在1993年至2015年之间在意大利连任。我们使用时间和城市固定的差异策略，通过三个不同的控制组对连选和投票率的概率进行了应用：三个城市分别是市政当局，相邻市政当局的子样本和已确定市政当局的子样本通过一对一的最近邻倾向得分匹配程序。我们发现，破坏性地震的发生显着增加了现任市长的连任机会和选民比例。我们认为，这一结果是由市长在提供灾难灾后恢复能力方面的优势以及灾难后在媒体上的更高可见性所驱动的。因此，地震发生的媒体相关性可能会使选民偏向现任议员。