When disaster experience shapes framing effects: hurricanes, partisanship, and environmental policy efficacy

Connecting the framing literature with research on personal experience and environmental attitudes, we investigate how partisanship and lived experience with hurricanes condition framing effects on perceptions of environmental policy efficacy. Merging county-level data on federally declared disasters with a survey framing experiment fielded to 1,344 U.S. adults, we find that for the hurricane-experienced, the local (vs. global) frame raised environmental policy efficacy among Republicans but lowered it among Democrats, while the risk (vs. benefit) frame backfired only for Democrats. The findings underscore the value of tailoring public-facing environmental messages to both partisanship and disaster experience and speak to the growing entanglement of disaster communication with partisan identity.