Representative bureaucracy and COVID‐19 among local emergency response professionals

Abstract

This article considers the opinions of local emergency management professionals with regard to the response of the US federal government to the COVID‐19 pandemic. The responses to a survey from May/June 2020 demonstrate that these feelings, ranging from highly successful to extremely poor, are reflective of the culture at large in the nation. The study will examine whether the feelings expressed by local officials are reflective of prevailing political leanings of their constituency, measured as the presidential voting habits from 2000 to 2020 in the respondent's jurisdiction. This will extend Hildebrand's (2020) testing which linked the emergency management field to the theory of “representative bureaucracy.” This theory surmises that government actors will be reflective of their body politic in their behavior and attitudes toward federal initiatives. The findings suggest that those who represent “Strong Republican” jurisdictions have greater odds in rating the federal response as being effective, and that those from “Strong Democrat” locations will have greater odds in rating the federal response as not effective at all. Statistical testing also suggests that as the population of the jurisdiction increases, the less likely the respondent was to consider the federal response to COVID‐19 effective.