Lobbying and emergency management in the United States: Issues, priorities and implications

Abstract

Recent scholarship has explored the impact of interest groups on policy in the United States. However, little remains known about lobbying efforts and their effects in emergency management. Through analysis of a large data set of declared political activities from 1999 to 2020, we describe lobbying efforts in disaster planning and emergencies. Our findings suggest that lobbying efforts and expenditure are positively associated with appropriations (but not disaster incidence or severity), that corporations and trade associations are the organizations most involved in lobbying and that many of these efforts appear to be aimed at impacting legislation and the procurement of public funds for recovery efforts. We also find that only a minuscule number of lobbying efforts are related to socially vulnerable populations or social equity concerns. Collectively, these insights raise important questions about this process, demonstrating the need for further research to better understand lobbying and emergency management in the United States across all phases of the disaster life cycle.

The Moral Foundations of Preparedness: Public Opinion about Federal Disaster Preparedness Spending in the US

“…We find that morality is associated with attitudes towards federal preparedness spending, with harm/care and fairness/reciprocity positively related to support for preparedness spending, and ingroup/loyalty positively associated with support for greater amounts of federal preparedness 1 This might reflect the influence of interest groups lobbying for the use of disaster-related funds on projects not associated with reducing risk (Jamieson and Louis-Charles, 2023).…”