Wesley Wehde

Wesley Wehde
Texas Tech University | TTU · Department of Political Science

About

40
Publications
3,732
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508
Citations
Introduction
I study how people and their policy preferences are related and react to natural hazards and climate change. In this domain, much of my research examines the role of information in behavior and belief change, such as how weather information is associated with climate beliefs or how the severity of natural hazard experience increases information seeking/sending behaviors. Methodologically, I primarily rely on rigorously designed surveys and quant. methods but use qual. data and methods too

Publications

Publications (40)
Article
Abstract The present study seeks to assess the determinants of gaming identity through the lens of the communication ecology model through a survey of U.S. video game players (n=184). Shame was found to moderate almost all variables, erasing the gender gap in the identification as a gamer, with the highest levels of shame also eroding the predictiv...
Preprint
The present study seeks to assess the determinants of gaming identity through the lens of the communication ecology model through a survey of U.S. video game players (n=184). Shame was found to moderate almost all variables, erasing the gender gap in the identification as a gamer, with the highest levels of shame also eroding the predictive power o...
Chapter
This chapter describes how to use the final weeks of a political science research methods class to jumpstart research projects. The chapter first briefly describes the structure of the course in research methods which is an introduction to the use of statistics in political and social science research. The chapter then describes how to use review s...
Article
We contribute to the growing body of research on COVID‐19 and pandemic response by connecting two bodies of existing but disparate research. Specifically, we examine how professionalization in emergency management is associated with collaborative outcomes. Using three unique surveys of local emergency managers (EMs) and convergent mixed methods, we...
Article
Full-text available
Social science studies of weather and natural hazards have examined in depth the sources of information individuals use in response to a disaster. This research has primarily focused on information sources in isolation and as they relate to severe weather. Thus, less research has examined how individuals use information acquisition strategies durin...
Chapter
Community-based resilience programs are a key part of the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction program. In general, the cost–benefit and economic analyses of such programs are conducted after the fact. Additionally, these analyses typically focus on more easily estimable costs and benefits related to infrastructure and less to quantifying the cos...
Article
Can experience with one set of policies result in support for a set of different, but related, policies? To show how this is possible, we develop a new dimension of policy feedback effects missing from prior studies – outcome distance. We then examine what we call a middle-distance outcome and apply this concept to the case of welfare attitudes in...
Article
Public support is a key contributor to successful policy adoption and implementation. Given the urgency of climate change mitigation, scholars have explored various determinants that affect public support for climate change mitigation policy. However, the relative decisiveness of these factors in shaping public support is insufficiently examined. T...
Article
Full-text available
How does the public decide who is deserving of welfare benefits? To shed light on this question, we investigate whether the CARIN principles of deservingness—specifically the ideas of control, attitude, reciprocity, identity, and need—impact the public's perception of American welfare target groups. We draw contrast between traditional welfare prog...
Article
Alarming increases in average global temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have motivated efforts to transition energy production to clean energy – especially renewable energy sources like wind and solar. While nuclear energy has the potential to provide significant amounts of zero‑carbon, baseload energy...
Article
Full-text available
We examine the assumption of individuals as ‘homo narrans’ and the effect of their demographics and beliefs in shaping policy narratives, using climate change as a case. To do so we use a version of the Narrative Policy Framework codebook to analyze open-ended survey responses in a highly liberal and knowledgeable convenience sample. We use two dif...
Article
Full-text available
Despite a general lack of political knowledge among the public, research demonstrates that individuals intuitively know which level of government should be, and sometimes is, responsible for policy problems. In this article, we look at public federalism preferences in the context of disaster management, particularly for managing the risks associate...
Article
Social capital — resources that are available as a result of social relationships and connections — has been shown to be an important component across the various stages of a natural disaster, such as a hurricane. Additionally, research has shown that the importance of the different types of social capital — bonding, bridging, and linking — can var...
Article
Full-text available
The use of social media and other communication technologies have created a new ecology of public messaging. As it is a core task of government to inform its residents about risks, public managers and emergency managers, specifically, must understand this new ecology if they are to effectively communicate with the public. A challenge of this new me...
Article
Investments in new weather forecasting technologies and communication products can be costly and serve the ultimate purpose of protecting life and property. The Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs) paradigm attempts to improve technology and communication through the provision of probabilistic hazard information (PHI). The rese...
Article
Existing research finds that increases in administrative burden reduce client access, political efficacy, and equity. However, extant literature has yet to investigate how administrative burden policies are interpreted by street‐level bureaucrats (SLB), whose values and beliefs structure uses of discretion and client experiences of programs. In thi...
Article
Using survey data collected from residents of counties along the South Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States, we use innovative compositional data analysis techniques to examine individuals’ assignment of responsibility for hurricane preparedness across federal, state, and local officials as well as among household residents and their commu...
Article
Full-text available
Scholars from various disciplines have long attempted to identify the variables most closely associated with individual preparedness. Therefore, we now have much more knowledge regarding these factors and their association with individual preparedness behaviors. However, it has not been sufficiently discussed how decisive many of these factors are...
Article
Full-text available
When the National Weather Service (NWS) issues a tornado warning, the alert is rapidly and widely disseminated to individuals in the general area of the warning. Historically, the assumption has been that a false-negative warning perception (i.e., when someone located within a warning polygon does not believe they have received a tornado warning) c...
Article
Weather and climate disasters pose an increasing risk to life and property in the United States. Managing this risk requires objective information about the nature of the threat and subjective information about how people perceive it. Meteorologists and climatologists have a relatively firm grasp of the historical objective risk. For example, we kn...
Article
Effective risk communication in the weather enterprise requires deep knowledge about the communities that enterprise members serve. This includes knowledge of the atmospheric and climate conditions in these communities as well as knowledge about the characteristics of the people living in these communities. Enterprise members often have access to d...
Preprint
Full-text available
Given the importance of public support for policy change and implementation, public policymakers and researchers have attempted to understand the factors associated with this support for climate change mitigation policy. In this article, we compare the feasibility of using different supervised learning methods for regression using a novel socio-eco...
Article
The risks associated with disasters can be significantly reduced if individuals are well prepared according to the orders and recommendations of emergency management authorities such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and local government. Despite this fact, there is evidence that individuals are not cooperative with these authoritie...
Article
Social criteria are important to achieving the mission of the National Weather Service. Accordingly, researchers and administrators at the NWS increasingly recognize a need to supplement verification statistics with complementary data about society in performance management and evaluation. This will require significant development of new capacities...
Article
Seismologists have reported that a majority of recent earthquakes in Oklahoma have been triggered by the activities of oil and gas companies. Despite this fact, there is evidence of strong opposition toward earthquake mitigation policy. In this article, we argue that how individuals define issues affect their policy choice. Furthermore, we incorpor...
Article
Objective This article examines various determinants of communication behaviors related to natural hazards and how those determinants vary for those at home or those away from home. We use the context of a series of storms that provoked communication to determine differences across media platforms, location during the event, sending versus receivin...
Article
Methods for identifying relevant policy impacts for valuation in benefit-cost analyses (BCAs) have received relatively little attention in academic research, applied policy analyses, and guidance documents. In this paper, we develop a systematic, transparent, and replicable process that draws upon information contained in records of Congressional h...
Article
Full-text available
The complexity of the modern information ecosystem raises many questions for public organizations. In the context of emergency management, information (such as warning messages) is communicated not only from a source of authority to the public but also between members of the public. The authors use a series of storms that affected Oklahoma in the s...
Article
In the wake of declining state support for higher education, many state leaders have adopted lottery earmark policies, which designate lottery revenue to higher education budgets as an alternative funding mechanism. However, despite the ubiquity of lottery earmarks for higher education, it remains unclear whether this new source of revenue serves t...
Article
Hydroelectric dams have social, cultural, and environmental impacts on society through both alterations of riverine effects (both downstream and in reservoirs) and the production and distribution of hydropower in a broader geographical area. Management of complex dam, hydroelectric, and river systems frequently requires tradeoffs between alternativ...
Article
Increasingly, policy scholars are using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to systematically study the narrative elements and strategies that policy actors and groups use to advance their agendas. The majority of these studies analyze reports, documents, and websites published by the actors and groups that are most active in the policy subsystem....
Research
Full-text available
Recently, scholars have developed the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to systematically identify and compare narrative strategies used by competing advocacy coalitions to advance their agendas. The majority of these studies analyze reports, documents, and websites published by the actors and groups most active in the policy subsystem. However, the...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recently, scholars have developed the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to systematically identify and compare narrative strategies used by competing advocacy coalitions to advance their agendas. The majority of these studies analyze reports, documents, and websites published by the actors and groups most active in the policy subsystem. However, the...

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