Flooding Feeds: Elite Issue Attention and Competition after a Natural Disaster
Submitted to World Politics
Abstract: Two rhetorical strategies dominate the party issue competition literature: issue ownership and wave-riding. Relaxing the assumption of parties as unitary actors, I theorize and empirically assess the extent to which candidates use these strategies following a salience shock. Rather than treat the two strategies as mutually exclusive, for candidates I argue they are synergistic. Concerns about opportunism both between and within parties suggest that increases in issue attention are driven by issue-owning candidates representing affected constituents. Using original candidate communication data from the 2021 German election, I leverage longitudinal and geographic variation in exposure to a natural disaster as a shock to climate salience to assess this conditional wave-riding hypothesis. Using an event study, I find that floodaffected Green candidates increase their climate issue attention compared to their unaffected partisans. Considering electoral returns to rhetoric, I find that increased climate attention was a vote-winning strategy for Green candidates.
Recommended citation: Pike, Ryan. (2025). Flooding Feeds: Elite Issue Attention and Competition after a Natural Disasters. Working Paper.
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