This paper asks whether voters reward or punish incumbents after natural disasters differently depending on the official’s party. Using Hurricane Sandy and longer-term historical data on U.S. presidential contests, the authors evaluate whether pre-existing partisanship conditions electoral responses to disaster damage and relief.
Disaster responses are political, but can citizens make useful decisions that help other people? This study uses an experimental economic game that simulates disaster choices to test whether people are willing and able to prevent disasters for others when options are complex and vary in risk. The authors report that players paid to help, invested in learning, and could identify which options were most useful across conditions, suggesting that people sometimes make costly, useful decisions on behalf of others.
Which factors influence how voters evaluate policy responses to economic shocks from natural disasters? This paper uses an original survey experiment among American citizens to test three fairness-based explanations—affectedness, need, and political ties—and compares those stated preferences to observed disaster-relief allocations from 1993–2008. The central contribution is a combined experimental and observational assessment that links mass preferences over distributional fairness to actual allocation patterns, while preserving the authors’ qualifications.