Ready When the Big One Comes? Natural Disasters and Mass Support for Preparedness Investment

Abstract

Societies can address collective threats such as natural disasters or pandemics by investing in preparedness (ex ante) or by offering compensation after an adverse event has occurred (ex post). What explains which of these options voters prefer? We study how personal exposure and policy knowledge affect mass support for long-term disaster preparedness, a type of long-term investment meant to cope with an increasingly destructive and frequent class of events. We first assess whether support for preparedness reflects personal affectedness and find that neither subjective nor geo-coded measures of disaster exposure predict policy preferences. Second, we explore whether this finding can be explained by misperceptions about the features of the available policy options. We find that revealing the damage reductions associated with preparedness systematically reduces opposition to long-term investment. These results suggest that opposition to preparing for collective threats may depend more on informational deficiencies than on personal experience with realized risks.

The Politics of Intersecting Crises: The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Climate Policy Preferences

“…Political polarization was initially low in the United States (Gadarian, Goodman, and Pepinsky 2021; Myers 2021) and in Canada (Merkley et al 2020) but increased in the United States as the pandemic wore on (Allcott et al 2020; Grossman et al 2020). By contrast, in an extensive literature assessing climate change opinion, scholars have focused on how such drivers as elite cues (Guntermann and Lachapelle 2020; Lee et al 2021; Merkley and Stecula 2020), framing (Aklin and Urpelainen 2013; Bernauer and McGrath 2016; Feldman and Hart 2018; Gifford and Comeau 2011; Nisbet 2009; Spence and Pidgeon 2010), information about economic costs and benefits (Ansolabehere and Konisky 2014; Stokes and Warshaw 2017), personal experience with a changing climate (Bechtel and Mannino 2021; Bergquist and Warshaw 2019; Egan and Mullin 2012; Howe et al 2019; Konisky, Hughes, and Kaylor 2016; Marlon et al 2021), economic downturns (Bakaki and Bernauer 2018; Elliott, Seldon, and Regens 1997; Inglehart 1977; Mildenberger and Leiserowitz 2017), and social norms (Bechtel, Genovese, and Scheve 2019; Mildenberger and Tingley 2019) influence beliefs about climate change and support for policies to address it. Scholars have also mapped the spatial distribution of climate beliefs in both the United States (Howe et al 2015; Bergquist and Warshaw 2019) and Canada (Mildenberger et al 2016).…”

US Partisan Polarization on Climate Change: Can Stalemate Give Way to Opportunity?

“…First, politicians can promote-and claim credit for-riskreduction projects without attributing the need for them to climate change (Hai and Perlman 2022). Although the political economy of disaster preparation does not offer strong incentives for preventive action (Dolšak and Prakash 2018;Healy and Malhotra 2009), attitudes about spending on prevention are less partisan than on other forms of climate policy (Bechtel and Mannino 2021).…”

Legislators do not harness voter support for disaster preparedness

“…On balance, the extant literature suggests disaster experience does not affect individual or community support for disaster preparedness. Following Bechtel and Mannino (2021), who attribute the observed lack of support not to voter apathy or disinterest but instead to informational deficiencies, we study whether reporting past collective losses can motivate support for preparedness without having to make predictions about future losses. We interrogate the source of public preferences by using a novel survey experiment that exposes respondents to a vignette differentiating between past disaster losses and future disaster losses.…”

“…Moving beyond studies of myopic legislators and retrospective voters that rely on observational data (Achen & Larry, 2017;Healy & Malhotra, 2009), we build off an emerging line of research using survey experiments (Bechtel & Mannino, 2021) to provide a more granular assessment of the underlying drivers of myopic voting. We specifically use a survey experiment with members of the public and with state legislators to understand individual preferences on disaster relief versus preparedness and find that respondents report similar support for disaster relief and preparedness.…”