Résumé
This paper provides new evidence on the role of political alignment in natural disasterrelief and its reward by voters at the municipal level. To analyze how political alignmentbetween state and municipalities may influence the disaster declaration and the probabilityfor citizens to get insurance compensations after a natural disaster, we exploit an originaldata set on natural disasters and French municipalities between 2008 and 2020. Using adifference-in-differences (DiD) strategy, we find that the political alignment between thelocal incumbent and the state significantly increases the probability to obtain a natural dis-aster declaration from state. To check whether citizens reward the incumbents who obtaineda disaster declaration and therefore insurance compensation, we apply a Heckman modelbased strategy to avoid selection bias. Although a natural disaster reduces the probabilityfor the incumbents to be reelected, this negative effect is lower when the disaster declarationwas decided by state.