Disastrous Discretion: Ambiguous Decision Situations Foster Political Favoritism
Metadata only
Datum
2022-04Typ
- Working Paper
ETH Bibliographie
yes
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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 hurricane strikes from 1965–2018 along with changes in political alignment. We show that decisions are not biased when disasters are unambiguously strong or weak. Only in ambiguous situations, after medium-intensity hurricanes, do areas governed by presidents’ co-partisans receive up to twice as many declarations. This political bias explains 10 percent of total relief spending, totaling USD 450 million per year. Mehr anzeigen
Publikationsstatus
publishedExterne Links
Zeitschrift / Serie
CESifo Working PapersBand
Verlag
CESifoThema
disaster relief; distributive politics; hurricanes; natural disasters; nonlinearity; party alignment; political favouritism; political economy; situational ambiguity.Organisationseinheit
02525 - KOF Konjunkturforschungsstelle / KOF Swiss Economic Institute
03716 - Sturm, Jan-Egbert / Sturm, Jan-Egbert
Zugehörige Publikationen und Daten
ETH Bibliographie
yes
Altmetrics