Disastrous Discretion: Ambiguous Decision Situations Foster Political Favoritism

Stephan Schneider and Sven Kunze

No 9710, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

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.

Keywords: disaster relief; distributive politics; hurricanes; natural disasters; nonlinearity; party alignment; political favouritism; political economy; situational ambiguity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H30 H84 P16 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-env and nep-pol
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Working Paper: Disastrous Discretion: Ambiguous Decision Situations Foster Political Favoritism (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9710

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