Retrospective Voting in the Premodern World: The Case of Natural Disasters in the Roman Republic

Political scientists frequently debate how “blind” retrospective voting is in the modern world. We test these arguments in a radically different time and place: the Roman Republic. We then leverage the exogenous nature of river flooding as well as the random assignment to office location in the Roman Republic to estimate the causal effect of flooding on those randomly assigned to be in the city when floods occurred. Analyzing 272 second-tier executive officials in the Republic, we find that significant flooding substantially increased the ability of those randomly placed in the city to achieve the Republic’s top executive office in the near future. Among those randomly assigned to be outside of the city, we find no evidence of any effect on short-term career advancement. These results indicate that floods were important opportunities to perform for voters, with no evidence of “blind” punishment for natural disasters. This is a working paper and should not be cited. We thank Andrew Clarke, Jeff Jenkins, and panel participants at the 2019 Southern Political Science Association General Meeting for their helpful suggestions.