From 2009... Voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending; we estimate that $1 spent on preparedness is worth about $15 of future damage mitigated

Healy, A., & Malhotra, N. (2009). Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy. American Political Science Review, 103(3), 387-406, Aug 2009. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055409990104

Abstract: Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending. These inconsistencies distort the incentives of public officials, leading the government to underinvest in disaster preparedness, thereby causing substantial public welfare losses. We estimate that $1 spent on preparedness is worth about $15 in terms of the future damage it mitigates. By estimating both the determinants of policy decisions and the consequences of those policies, we provide more complete evidence about citizen competence and government accountability.

DISCUSSION

A government responding to the incentives implied by our results will underinvest in natural disaster preparedness. The inability of voters to effectively hold government accountable thus appears to contribute to significant inefficiencies in government spending because the results show that preparedness spending substantially reduces future disaster damage. Voters are, in a word, myopic. They are not, as we have shown, myopic in the sense that they respond more to spending just before an election than to spending a year or two earlier; rather, they are myopic in the sense that they are unwilling to spend on natural disasters before the disasters have occurred. An ounce of prevention would be far more efficient than a pound of cure, but voters seem interested only in the cure. The resulting inconsistencies in democratic accountability reduce public welfare by discouraging reelection-minded politicians from investing in protection, while encouraging them to provide assistance after harm has already occurred.

Although we consider our findings to be relevant to potential underinvestments in preparedness in areas beyond natural disasters such as preventive medicine, the government almost certainly does not underinvest in all kinds of preparedness. For example, after the attacks on September 11, large investments were made in preventing future attacks on passenger jets. One clear difference between airport security and most natural disaster preparedness measures is that airport security is highly observable and salient. Moreover, this example may be the exception that proves the rule we have demonstrated in this article. When voters provide their elected officials with incentives to make mistakes— ranging from insufficient investment in natural disaster preparedness to perhaps excessive attention to airline security—elected officials are likely to provide the inefficient policies that voters implicitly reward. Moreover, it is possible that major events such as Hurricane Katrina can heighten the value of natural disaster preparedness, but this effect may be temporary. For example, California passed Proposition 1E in 2006, a measure that provided bond financing for $4.1 billion in flood control measures, with $3 billion for upgrades to levees in the Central Valley, an area considered by experts to be exposed to catastrophic flooding due to insufficient protection from the existing levee network. Experts characterized the situation as a “ticking time bomb” in January 2005 (California ceeds were to be used to obtain federal matching funds for the projects, in addition to financial and technical assistance from federal agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers. Despite repeated warnings about the risk of severe flooding in the Central Valley, large-scale action was implemented only after Hurricane Katrina made the danger salient. The importance of Hurricane Katrina in ensuring support for Proposition 1E is suggested by the short argument that supporters of the measure included on the ballot. The argument read, “Our nation learned a tragic lesson from Hurricane Katrina— we cannot continue to neglect our unsafe levees and flood control systems” (California Attorney General 2006). The measure passed easily, winning 64% of the vote, including 67% of the vote in Los Angeles County and 56% of the vote in relatively conservative Orange County, despite the fact that neither would be affected directly by the bulk of the proposed spending. For voters in these areas, it appears to be the case that levee repair became a public good that voters were willing to support after Hurricane Katrina made clear the potential costs of inaction.27

A similar phenomenon appears to have occurred at the federal level. Following Hurricane Katrina, Congress passed and President Bush signed the PostKatrina Emergency Reform Act of 2006, which reorganized FEMA and appropriated $3.6 billion for levees and other flood control measures.28 In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, voters in New Orleans also appear to have placed greater value on these preparedness projects. In late 2006, 30% of New Orleans residents said that “repairing the levees, pumps, and floodwalls” should be one of the top two priorities in the rebuilding efforts, ranking this item and crime control as their top two concerns (Kaiser Family Foundation 2007, 55). The increased voter concern for disaster protection appears to have faded significantly since then. By mid-2008, only 2% of New Orleans voters ranked “hurricane protection/rebuilding floodwalls, levees” as the top rebuilding concern (Kaiser Family Foundation 2008, 52). This apparent change in priorities for New Orleans residents suggests that even an event like Hurricane Katrina is likely to increase the salience of preparedness issues only temporarily. Interestingly, the case of Hurricane Katrina may be anomalous with respect to the electoral benefits of rethan $94.8 billion in relief payments to the Gulf Coast following Katrina (Congressional Budget Office 2007), and the Republican Party suffered heavy losses in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Unlike most disaster events, Hurricane Katrina was highly unique in the substantial amount of media coverage it received. In an Associated Press poll of U.S. news editors and in the Pew Research Center U.S. News Interest Index, Hurricane Katrina was the top world story of 2005 (Kohut, Allen, and Keeter 2005), and most of this coverage focused on the mishandled immediate logistical response to the disaster as opposed to the generous financial response that came later. Hence, voters may have been substantially affected by the early negative media coverage and carried those initially formed attitudes about the administration’s competence with them into the voting booth. Nevertheless, the case of Katrina offers two potential extensions to this research. Subsequent studies can explore how the salience of a disaster changes the political effectiveness of relief spending, in addition to more closely examining how logistical response differs from financial response.

Due to the transience of the effect that disasters have on the visibility of preparedness, it is important to note that there is some suggestive evidence that governments may be able to take action to make preparedness salient to voters in a more permanent fashion. In the late 1990s, FEMA introduced Project Impact, a grassroots disaster preparedness initiative that emphasized collaboration between government, businesses, and local community leaders, bypassing state governments (Birkland andWaterman 2008;Wachtendorf and Tierney 2001; Witt 1998). Under Project Impact, FEMA selected a group of 57 communities from all 50 states (as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia) to receive either $500,000 or $1-million grants to pursue disaster preparedness and mitigation initiatives (Government Accounting Office 2002). The program targeted areas of varying size and disaster risk. Interviews with participants in the program indicate that people valued the program. It was also credited with helping limit damage from the February 2001 Nisqually earthquake in the Puget Sound, ironically on the very day that the program was cancelled by the Bush Administration (Holdeman 2005). Compared to other counties, the change in the Democrats’ vote share from 1996 to 2000 was 1.9% higher in Project Impact counties, a significant difference (p = .006) (Healy and Malhotra 2009). This estimate is only suggestive of the possibility that voters may have responded to Project Impact because it is not possible to control for the omitted variables that could be driving this difference.29 Future scholarship could use surveys, as well as lab and field experiments, to determine the extent to which voter decisions can be influenced by government efforts at increasing the salience of issues and policies in areas such as disaster preparedness.

Although our results indicate that the incumbent presidential party has not been rewarded for investing in disaster preparedness, it is possible that voters could credit members of Congress for those initiatives. A natural extension to this analysis is to explore whether similar effects are observed in House and Senate elections. We conducted a preliminary exploration of this question by estimating analogous models predicting the vote share for the incumbent Senate party in the county as the dependent variable. For a variety of potential reasons, we did not obtain precise coefficient estimates from which to draw firm conclusions.30 Across all specifications that we considered, though, preparedness spending entered with a near-zero coefficient. We anticipate that future research more closely examining Congressional elections will find that members of Congress, like presidents, are not rewarded for preparedness spending.

Subsequent research could also apply our empirical strategy of simultaneously examining voting decisions, government policy, and associated outcomes to issues such as education or health care, as well as explore potential ingredients for improved retrospection. A more complete understanding of how citizens value preparedness and relief across a variety of domains could both advance our theoretical understanding of retrospective voting and help inform policy making. Through an analysis of voter responses to disaster relief and preparedness spending, we have addressed outstanding questions in the long-standing and extensive literature on citizen competence in democratic societies. Examining actual decisions by the electorate, we found heterogeneity with respect to the public’s responsiveness to various government policies. However, we have also shown that the mere presence of responsiveness does not necessarily indicate citizen competence and that failures in accountability can lead to substantial welfare losses.