Disastrous Discretion: Political Bias in Relief Allocation Varies Substantially with Disaster Severity

Abstract

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of all hurricane strikes from 1965-2018 along with changes in political alignment. We show that decisions are unbiased when disasters are either very strong or weak. Only after medium-intensity hurricanes do areas governed by presidents' co-partisans receive up to twice as many declarations. This hump-shaped political bias explains 8.3 percent of overall relief spending, totaling about USD 400 million per year.

Drought‐Reliefs and Partisanship

“…Tarquinio (2020) finds a negative alignment effect in India, motivated by the fact that the return on transfers is smaller in aligned municipalities. 3 Tarquinio (2020) and Schneider and Kunze (2023) observe similar patterns in India and in the USA.…”

Large indirect economic impacts of tropical cyclones shaped by disaster response

“…However, it is possible that this result does not reflect the causal effect of the disaster declaration, but instead that different types of TCs or different regions preferentially receive declarations. To examine this possibility, we leverage previous findings that disaster declarations are shaped by political factors: Declarations are more likely when incumbent Presidents are running for reelection, and Presidents are more likely to issue declarations to areas that are politically aligned with their party (42)(43)(44). We use these factors to predict the probability of declarations as a function of political factors that are plausibly exogenous from the characteristics of individual TCs (Methods and Table S3).…”