Infrastructural shocks and their political consequences: evidence from the 2025 Iberian Blackout

WIP Seminar

Tuesday, May 26
12:15 to 13:00
UNIL - Géopolis, Room 5799

Laura Silva: "Infrastructural shocks and their political consequences: evidence from the 2025 Iberian Blackout"

Infrastructure encodes promises of collective provision and resilience. When it fails simultaneously across an entire community, private hardship can become shared grievance, with potential consequences for how citizens relate to political institutions and parties. This paper exploits the April 28th, 2025 Iberian blackout as a quasi-natural experiment to examine whether communities that experienced greater infrastructural disruption reacted differently at the polls and in their political attitudes. Using geographic variation in mobile network outage intensity, I estimate the effect of disruption severity on attitudinal shifts in political participation and party identification in Spain and on electoral behaviour in Portugal's May 18th legislative election. The paper contributes to sociological debates on how collective material disruptions become politically legible, extending the comparative literature on load shedding in South Africa to a novel European context.