Environmental Disasters, Gender, and Incumbency Punishment

Do voters punish female incumbents more harshly than male incumbents during environmental crises? Crises can exacerbate traditional gender biases that lead voters to prefer masculine leadership. These biases could also result in voters evaluating female incumbents’ performance more stringently in the wake of harmful climate events. We use an original vignette experiment in South Africa, Brazil, and India to test whether female incumbents face harsher electoral accountability during a drought. Droughts are salient environmental crises in these contexts, and they are events that provide voters with information about an incumbent’s competency through his or her drought response. Biases may lead to differential evaluations of male and female incumbents’ drought responses, creating gendered obstacles to maintaining office. Our findings have important implications for women’s representation, especially in the context of climate change where droughts are becoming more common and severe, particularly in the Global South. If voters are likely to punish female incumbents more harshly during drought times, then the increased prevalence of droughts may create more obstacles to women’s representation in afflicted regions.