Long-term electoral participation among Swedish survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Natural disasters can spark demands for democratic accountability yet impose losses and displacement that depress participation. We study approximately 16,000 Swedish tourists exposed to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami who returned home to intact communities. Unlike most people exposed to natural disasters, they faced no increase in the cost of voting, so the case is well suited to studying motivational responses to disaster exposure. We link a survivor registry to population-wide administrative data (N up to 7 million) and use entropy balancing to compare survivors to matched non-exposed citizens over 25 years. Exposed individuals do not withdraw from participation. Their turnout is 1.4 percentage points higher in 2010 and 2018, a modest but persistent gap. The gap is more than twice as large among the bereaved. Mobilization is strongest among those exposed between ages 16 and 25, which is what habit formation would predict. A 2023 follow-up survey (3,956 respondents; N = 3198 to 3625 per analysis after item non-response) provides descriptive evidence that survivors still evaluate the government's crisis response negatively and have shifted their partisan sympathies away from the then-incumbent party. The findings indicate that failed crisis management may have lasting consequences for turnout and potentially party choice, and that the electoral stakes of disaster response extend beyond the disaster zone.