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Citizen Competence and Government Accountability: Voter Responses to Natural Disaster Relief and Preparedness Spending
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 a dollar spent on preparedness is worth about fifteen dollars 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. for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We particularly thank Farley Howell and Susan Waller of FEMA for helpful discussions. We acknowledge Gena Gammie and Christopher Paik for excellent research assistance. Finally, we greatly appreciate helpful comments from anonymous reviewers and the editors.
... Evidence in political research suggests the dominance of present interests over future considerations creates major problems for implementing sustainability initiatives (Depoorter, 2006;Healy & Malhotra, 2009). A study by Depoorter (2006) analyzes the effectiveness of disaster management 10 Administration & Society programs through the public choice framework, in which politicians are "sellers" of disaster management policies and voters are "consumers." ...
... Such expenditures are directly attributed to the current administration, thereby allowing organizations to claim immediate credit for their work, which can, when managed correctly, increase the probability of gaining recognition and electoral rewards. As evidence of these trends, Healy and Malhotra's (2009) analysis demonstrates that the disparity between government spending on disaster relief and preparedness has grown considerably since 1988. Relief spending exceeded preparedness spending across the country in 1988; however, this gap had widened considerably by 2004. ...
... While Healy and Malhotra's (2009) findings help explain why long-term sustainability initiatives often fail, their interviews with governmental officials at Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) afford deeper insights worth noting. According to these interviews, FEMA civil servants have continually pushed for larger preparedness budgets; however, the agency lacks enough autonomy to push its agenda and prioritize preparedness over relief. ...
Drawing on perspectives from several academic traditions, we argue that sustainability is best understood as intergenerational social equity. When viewed thusly, it is possible to determine what socially responsible organizations look like in practice. After reviewing historic claims and evidence of sustainability, we turn to modern applications of institutionally based sustainability. We then describe sustainability in the framework of an intergenerational social equity model, claiming that the legacies of social and cultural institutions are evidence of sustainability in action. We conclude with a discussion of what it means for an organization to be socially responsible given our understanding of sustainability.
... They find that states that are politically important to the president receive more declarations of disasters and that states that have congressional seats on FEMA oversight committees receive more funds. Healy and Malhotra (2009) find that the percentage of votes for the presidential incumbent rises with ex-post disaster relief spending; thus a politician that diverts resources can expect a pay-off at the ballot box. This is consistent with a political interpretation of the inability of the central government to commit to ex-ante transfer design. ...
This paper surveys recent research on decentralization and natural disasters. The first part discusses results from theoretical models that have been used to study the issues that arise when natural disasters occur in a country with more than one level of government. The next section discusses the empirical results that have been found in the literature. A third section briefly touches upon practical problems that arise when decentralized governments are confronted with a natural disaster. The paper concludes by reflecting on what we know about whether policies to confront natural disasters should be centralized or decentralized.
... vol-ume_2_agency_chapters_part_i_web.pdf ) 3 This comparison understates the true difference because of the strong exponential logic of the Richter scale.See appendix 1. 4 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7992936.stm 5 Some research has shown that voters reward mitigation expenditures (post-disaster relief) more than prevention expenditures.Healy and Malhotra (2009) show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending (ineffective in reducing earthquake mortality) but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending (more effective). Our argument is not, however, that elected governments set policy optimally with respect to mortality prevention; only t ...
Governments can significantly reduce earthquake mortality by enforcing quake-proof construction regulation. We examine why many governments do not. First, mortality is lower in countries with higher earthquake propensity, where the payoffs to investments in mortality prevention are greater. Second, the opportunity costs of these investments are higher in poorer countries; mortality is correspondingly less responsive to propensity in poor countries. Third, mortality is higher at any level of quake propensity when governments have fewer incentives to provide public goods, such as in autocracies with less institutionalized ruling parties or in more corrupt countries.
Recent experience with disasters and terrorist attacks in the US indicates that state and local governments rely on the federal sector for support after disasters occur. But these same governments are responsible for investing in infrastructure designed to reduce vulnerability to natural and man-made hazards. This division of responsibilities - state governments providing protection from disasters and federal government providing insurance against their occurrence - leads to the tension that is at the heart of our analysis. We explore these tensions building on the model of Persson and Tabellini (1996). We show that when the federal government is committed to full insurance against disasters, states will have incentives to underinvest in costly protective measures. We then show that when the central government cannot verify state investment choices, the optimal insurance system would be designed to reward states that succeed in avoiding disasters and punish those that do not, thereby giving states an incentive to increase investment in protective infrastructure. However, this raises the question of whether the central government can credibly commit to such a scheme, and we find in a simple political model that it cannot. In our political model, the central government will decrease transfers ex-post if a state provides protective infrastructure that increases its expected uncertain income, generating a soft-budget constraint for states. This provides an additional incentive for states to underinvest in protective infrastructure. We discuss these results in light of disaster policy in the US.
Governments can significantly reduce earthquake mortality by implementing and enforcing quake-proof construction regulation. The authors examine why many governments do not. Contrary to intuition, controlling for the strength and location of actual earthquakes, mortality is lower in countries with higher earthquake propensity, where the payoffs to mortality prevention are higher. Importantly, however, the government response to earthquake propensity depends on country income and the political incentives of governments to provide public goods to citizens. The opportunity costs of earthquake mortality prevention are higher in poorer countries; rich countries invest more in mortality prevention than poor countries in response to a higher earthquake propensity. Similarly, governments that have fewer incentives to provide public goods, such as younger democracies, autocracies with less institutionalized ruling parties and countries with corrupt regimes, respond less to an elevated quake propensity. They therefore have higher mortality at any level of quake propensity compared to older democracies, autocracies with highly institutionalized parties and non-corrupt regimes, respectively. The authors find robust evidence for these predictions in our analysis of earthquake mortality over the period 1960 to 2005.
Studies of the electoral consequences of changing economic conditions have not been able to distinguish the effects of macroeconomic conditions on the vote from those of personal financial circumstances. That is because research to date has relied either on exclusively aggregate-level information analyzed longitudinally or exclusively individual-level survey data analyzed cross-sectionally. This study employs a pooling of National Election Studies survey data, 1956-84, augmented by a time series of national economic statistics to evaluate "sociotropic" and "pocketbook" conceptions of voting and to assess the advantage of incumbency in presidential elections. Personal financial predicaments are found to carry weight in individuals' voting decisions, but changing macroeconomic conditions are more important as determinants of election outcomes. Also, the degree to which incumbency is an electoral asset depends upon election-year economic circumstances. Although it was not designed for such purposes, the model presented here generally forecast presidential election outcomes well, even though it ignored the personalities and issues of the campaigns. That result provokes some thoughts about the impact of campaign events and strategies on presidential contests.
This report updates an earlier study that examined the effects of changes in both personal and national economic conditions on individual vote decisions and, ultimately, on election outcomes themselves. Adding data for 1988 to the 1956-84 series (and correcting some errors in one variable) reinforces the quantitative and qualitative results of the previous analysis. The findings suggest that prevailing macrolevel conditions strongly advantaged any Republican candidate over any Democratic opponent in 1988, quite apart from any effects of the campaign itself.
This paper provides a rational explanation for the observation of oversized coalitions, often approaching unanimous size, in the realm of distributive policies. Distributive policies are those which concentrate benefits in specific geographic areas (states, congressional districts) while spreading costs through general taxation. The explanation offered here-that legislators may rationally prefer universalism to "hard-ball" coalition politics-generalizes earlier work of Weingast and Fiorina. In particular, it extends their results to pork-barrel politics, i.e., projects that are economically inefficient, and demonstrates how packages of economically inefficient projects can nevertheless be politically popular. The main theoretical feature that induces preferences for universalism is uncertainty over the composition of winning coalitions and, consequently, the desire for the political "insurance" that universalism provides.
Court-ordered redistricting in the mid-1960s eradicated severe disparities in the populations of U.S. state legislative districts. We examine the geographic distribution of money by states to counties. Cross-sectional analysis shows that counties with relatively more legislativeseats per person prior to redistricting received relatively more transfers from the state per person. Over time, counties that lost legislative seats subsequently received a smaller share of state funds per capita. We calculate that population equalization significantly altered the flow of state transfers to counties, diverting approximately $7 billion annually from formerly overrepresented to formerly underrepresented counties, an effect missed by past studies. For those concerned with the design of democratic institutions around the world today, the American experience provides clear evidence of the political consequences of unequal representation.
Economic voting is examined in gubernatorial and senatorial elections. The findings of this study show that the assignment of functional responsibilities in a federal system determines the subject of voters' retrospective and prospective candidate and party evaluations and thus differentiates the content of vote decisions at each level of government. Voters are thought to assign the federal government a preponderant responsibility for managing the national and regional economies, and thus hold congressional and presidential incumbents more accountable than their subnational counterparts for subnational macro- and microeconomic conditions.
Governmental responses to Hurricane Katrina are generally cited as policy failures. Media and popular analyses focus on the
federal government's policy failures in hazard preparedness, response, and recovery. Meanwhile, disaster experts realize that
disaster response is a shared intergovernmental responsibility. We examine the federal nature of natural disaster policy in
the US to consider whether federalism, or other factors, had the greatest influence on the failures in Katrina. We find that
some policy failures are related to policy design considerations based in federalism, but that the national focus on “homeland
security” and the concomitant reduction in attention to natural hazards and disasters, are equally, if not more complicit,
in the erosion of government disaster management capacity that was revealed in Hurricane Katrina.
Offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions. The model emphasizes the importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political respresentation.-from Author
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, only one thing disintegrated as fast as the earthen levees that were supposed to protect the city, and that was the intergovernmental relationship that is supposed to connect local, state and federal officials before, during and after such a catastrophe. In sifting through the debris of the disaster response, the first question is why intergovernmental cooperation broke down so completely. While it's hard even at this point to get an official accounting of exactly what happened, clearly there were significant communication and coordination problems at all levels of government. At the moment, much time and effort is being spent assigning culpability-for a lack of preparation, delayed decision making, bureaucratic tie-ups and political infighting-to individuals and agencies. But in the end, such investigations may produce little that is of widespread practical use. What is more critical, and has significant implications for the future of emergency management in the United States, is the need to explicitly and thoroughly define governments' roles and responsibilities so that officials in other jurisdictions don't suffer the same sort of meltdown in the next natural or man-made disaster. The lurching tactical responses to the terrorist attacks of 2001 and this year's rash of major hurricanes only underline the truly fundamental issue: how to sort out who should do what-and how to make sure the public sector is ready to act when the unexpected but inevitable happens. It won't be easy. Some in the federal government clearly feel that if they're going to be blamed for failures-failures that they ascribe at least in part to state and local officials-then they'd prefer a system where the federal government has the option of being much more preemptive in handling large-scale domestic disasters. States as a whole, though, are not going to go along with any emergency management plan that involves the feds declaring something like martial law. They would much prefer that existing protocols be continued and the Federal Emergency Management Agency regain its independence from the Department of Homeland Security and be led by experienced professionals rather than political appointees. Copyright
This report summarizes principal federal disaster assistance programs forpossible use by Members of Congress and staff in helping address the needsof constituents. A number of federal agencies provide assistance to victims;to state, territorial, and local governments; and to nongovernmental entitiesfollowing a disaster. Among other forms of assistance, federal programs canprovide grants, loans, loan guarantees, temporary housing, and counseling.The programs summarized in this catalog fall into two broad categories.First are programs specifically for disaster situations; most of these programsare administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)and the Small Business Administration (SBA). The Homeland Security Actof 2002 (P.L. 107-296) transferred FEMA to the new Department ofHomeland Security. Second are general assistance programs that may beused in disaster situations, as well as to meet regular service needs. Manyfederal agencies, including the Departments of Health and Human Services,Housing and Urban Development, and Justice, administer programs that maybe brought to bear under certain circumstances. The programs may also be classified by recipients: primarily individuals,state and local governments, or businesses. They address such short-termneeds as food and shelter, and such long-term needs as repair of publicutilities.
This book attempts to redirect the field of voting behavior research by proposing a paradigm-shifting framework for studying voter decision making. An innovative experimental methodology is presented for getting ‘inside the heads’ of citizens as they confront the overwhelming rush of information from modern presidential election campaigns. Four broad theoretically-defined types of decision strategies that voters employ to help decide which candidate to support are described and operationally-defined. Individual and campaign-related factors that lead voters to adopt one or another of these strategies are examined. Most importantly, this research proposes a new normative focus for the scientific study of voting behavior: we should care about not just which candidate received the most votes, but also how many citizens voted correctly - that is, in accordance with their own fully-informed preferences.
With over six million buildings located within the boundaries of the 100-yr floodplain, flood losses across the United States are widespread (88% of US counties experienced at least one flood disaster during the second half of the twentieth century). To deal with this problem, the federal government provides flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program, which was initiated by Congress in 1968 and amended significantly in 1969, 1973, and 1994. This article describes the US approach to flood insurance and notes a number of problems that have limited its effectiveness. Flood hazard identification is incomplete, and methods used are flawed. Mitigation has failed to contain increasing exposure to property damage in floods and coastal storms, and it has failed to markedly reduce exposure to loss of older buildings located in flood hazard areas. Market penetration of flood insurance is low, in spite of mandatory purchase requirements for new construction and the availability of subsidized insurance rates for older buildings located in flood-hazard areas. These problems, although serious, can be remedied through a variety of actions taken by governments at the federal, state, and local level.
It is widely assumed that political action is motivated most powerfully by issues that impinge immediately and tangibly upon private life. For example, this assumption pervades the aggregate research that has reported consistent relationships between general economic conditions and congressional election outcomes (e.g., Kramer, 1971). Our analysis of individual-level data, however, indicates that voting in congressional elections from 1956 to 1976 was influenced hardly at all by personal economic grievances. Those voters unhappy with changes in their financial circumstances, or those who had recently been personally affected by unemployment, showed little inclination to punish candidates of the incumbent party for their personal misfortunes. The connection between economic conditions and politics was provided, instead, by judgments of a more general, collective kind--e.g., by judgments regarding recent trends in general business conditions, and, more powerfully, by judgments about the relative competence of the two major parties to manage national economic problems. These collective economic judgments had little to do with privately experienced economic discontents. Rather they stemmed from voters' partisan predispositions and from their appraisal of changes in national economic conditions.
Voters in mass elections are notorious for their apparent lack of information about relevant political matters. While some scholars argue that an electorate of well-informed voters is necessary for the production of responsive electoral outcomes, others argue that apparently ignorant voters will suffice because they can adapt their behavior to the complexity of electoral choice. To evaluate the validity of these arguments, I develop and analyze a survey of California voters who faced five complicated insurance reform ballot initiatives. I find that access to a particular class of widely available information shortcuts allowed badly informed voters to emulate the behavior of relatively well informed voters. This finding is suggestive of the conditions under which voters who lack encyclopedic information about the content of electoral debates can nevertheless use information shortcuts to vote as though they were well informed.
I compare the price elasticity of economic and political preferences. My central hypothesis is that willingness to pay, whether expressed verbally or through cash transactions, is more price-elastic for economic consumption goods than for public goods. I find that increases in price greatly diminish the proportion of people willing to pay for consumer goods, such as housing or hardback books; whereas the proportion willing to pay more in taxes to support a public good, such as environmental protection or shelter for the homeless, is much less responsive to changes in price. I conclude by discussing the theoretical and political implications of willingness to pay for public and private goods.
Abstract The best current defense of democracy is the theory of retrospective voting. Citizens may not know much about the issues, the argument goes, but they can tell good from bad outcomes, and that allows them to remove incompetent or corrupt incumbents. Moreover, knowing that the voters use that rule, every government will have every incentive to do what they want, thus fulfilling the promise of democratic theory. Some formal analysis and much empirical work during the last several decades, particularly on “pocketbook voting,” has seemed to uphold this interpretation. We find, however, that the voters cannot manage,the task of competent retrospection. They forget all about most previous experience with the incumbents and vote solely on how they feel about the most recent months. Knowing that, governments pander tothe voters near election time, showering them with one-time benefits atypical of their performance in office.Governments are retained or removed, then, not because they drift away from the voters ideologically or because they have performed poorly on
Hurricane Katrina illustrates the natural disaster syndrome. Prior to a disaster, individuals in hazard-prone regions do not voluntarily adopt cost-effective loss reduction measures. The federal government then comes to the rescue with disaster assistance even if it claimed it had no intention of doing so prior to the event. There are a number of reasons why individuals do not protect themselves prior to a disaster. They underestimate the likelihood of a future disaster, often believing that it will not happen to them; have budget constraints; are myopic in their behavior; and/or do not want to be the only one on the block modifying their structure. Given this lack of interest in voluntary protection, benefit-cost analysis can determine when a well-enforced building code would be appropriate. The article concludes by highlighting the importance of public-private partnerships as a way of reducing future disaster losses and aiding the recovery process.
A variety of recent research has dealt with the impact of economic conditions on congressional elections. The underlying assumption of this research has been that the effects of economic fluctuations are distributed evenly across members of the president's party. By focusing on subgroups of congressional candidates, we demonstrate that the importance of economic conditions varies widely. Specifically, we show that the aggregate electoral margins of incumbents are far more responsive to economic conditions than are those for nonincumbents, and that among in-party incumbents, the relationship is stronger among those with higher levels of tenure. Further, we demonstrate that the previous lack of individual-level confirmation of the aggregate relationship has been due to a failure to control for the contextual effects implied by our conditional aggregate analysis. With controls for district incumbency, we find a relationship between retrospective personal financial condition and vote choice that mirrors the aggregate relationship between retrospective performance of the national economy and congressional vote totals.
Theory: Characterizing voters as rational actors who update their party affiliations based on a Bayesian assimilation of new information, Achen (1992) showed that a revisionist model of party identification generates, among its empirical implications, stable partisanship among adults. The model further implies that susceptibility to partisan change declines with age. The significance of Achen's model for the study of party identification leads us to examine more closely its underlying assumptions and the empirical ramifications of this and other learning models. Method: This essay develops a more general learning model, based upon the Kalman filter, that encompasses the Achen model as a special case. Results: We show that the Achen assumption of a fixed party benefit level leads to implausible implications about how voters learn from the history of party performance. When party benefit levels are allowed to vary over time, models of voter learning no longer imply that partisan attitudes, even among the older segments of the population, remain stable in the wake of new information about the parties. We conclude by discussing the empirical viability of our revised learning model and its implications for the study of partisan attitudes.
With over six million buildings located within the boundaries of the 100-yr floodplain, flood losses across the United States are widespread (88% of US counties experienced at least one flood disaster during the second half of the twentieth century). To deal with this problem, the federal government provides flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program, which was initiated by Congress in 1968 and amended significantly in 1969, 1973, and 1994. This article describes the US approach to flood insurance and notes a number of problems that have limited its effectiveness. Flood hazard identification is incomplete, and methods used are flawed. Mitigation has failed to contain increasing exposure to property damage in floods and coastal storms, and it has failed to markedly reduce exposure to loss of older buildings located in flood hazard areas. Market penetration of flood insurance is low, in spite of mandatory purchase requirements for new construction and the availability of subsidized insurance rates for older buildings located in flood-hazard areas. These problems, although serious, can be remedied through a variety of actions taken by governments at the federal, state, and local level.
When government fails, whom do citizens blame? Do these assessments rely on biased or content-rich information? Despite the vast literatures on retrospective voting in political science and attribution in psychology, there exists little theory and evidence on how citizens apportion blame among public officials in the wake of government failure. We designed a survey experiment in which respondents ranked seven public officials in order of how much they should be blamed for the property damage and loss of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. We manipulated the information provided to respondents, with some receiving the officials’ party affiliations, others receiving their job titles, and others receiving both cues. We find that party cues cause individuals to blame officials of the opposite party, but citizens make more principled judgments when provided with information about officials’ responsibilities. These results have implications for our understanding of the impact of heuristics and information on retrospective evaluations of government performance.
The concept of responsibility lies at the heart of theories of democratic accountability. This article represents the first attempt to explicitly model attributions of presidential versus congressional responsibility for the economy. The article investigates the extent to which contextual and individual-level factors influence citizens' attributions of responsibility for the economy and how, in turn, such judgments shape their political evaluations. Employing a multinomial probit model of attributional choice, I find that responsibility judgments are shaped to varying degrees by economic ideology, perceptions of institutional context, and partisanship, although the effects of partisanship are not uniform across political parties. The results demonstrate that responsibility attributions are politically consequential and moderate the effects of economic perceptions on presidential and congressional approval. Finally, the results suggest that the effects of responsibility attributions in the sanctioning process are not invariant across the target of institutional evaluation.
Scholars have uniformly presumed that news media attention to a policy issue increases its impact on presidential job performance evaluations because news coverage enhances the accessibility of beliefs about the issue in citizens' memories, which automatically increases their impact on relevant judgments. The research reported here demonstrates that media coverage of an issue does indeed increase the cognitive accessibility of related beliefs, but this does not produce priming. Instead, politically knowledgeable citizens who trust the media to be accurate and informative infer that news coverage of an issue means it is an important matter for the nation, leading these people to place greater emphasis on that issue when evaluating the President. Thus, news media priming does not occur because politically naive citizens are "victims" of the architecture of their minds, but instead appears to reflect inferences made from a credible institutional source of information by sophisticated citizens.
We have argued elsewhere that retrospective voting is often causally unsophisticated, ideologically confused, and highly myopic (Achen and Bartels 2002; 2004). Here, we extend those assertions to party realignments, arguing that they, too, depend far less on ideological shifts than on the simple cumulation of myopic retrospections in election years. We examine voters' responses to the most far-reaching economic disaster in the history of democratic politics, the Great Depression. In contrast to Key (1958) and others who have interpreted the New Deal realignment in the U.S. as "a popular ratification of the broad features of new public policy," we show that Democratic gains in the 1930s were based primarily on short-term income gains and losses, which cumulated willy-nilly into a durable Democratic majority in the electorate. This interpretation is bolstered by comparison with other democracies in which voters produced equally significant and durable partisan realignments— and equally successful economic recoveries—by punishing whoever was in office at the time--liberal incumbents (Britain, Australia), conservative and then liberal incumbents (Sweden), liberal and then conservative incumbents (Canada), anti-nationalist incumbents (Ireland), or coalitions including many or all of the mainstream parties (Weimar Germany). We also document the role of economic discontent in the Irish realignment, which previous scholars have interpreted as a triumph of nationalist ideology. Finally, we describe the rise of the Social Credit Party in the Canadian province of Alberta, which dramatizes the vulnerability of democratic electorates to demagogues and ideological extremists in times of economic distress.
Natural disasters occur in a political space. Although events beyond our control may trigger a disaster, the level of government preparedness and response greatly determines the extent of suffering incurred by the affected population. We use a political economy model of disaster prevention, supported by case studies and preliminary empirics to explain why some governments prepare well for disasters and others do not. We show how the presence of international aid distorts this choice and increases the chance that governments will under-invest. Policy suggestions that may alleviate this problem are discussed.
National economic conditions regularly influence outcomes in U.S. presidential elections. However, beyond this simple finding, much remains unclear. How large are national economic effects? Which macroeconomic indicators? Subjective or objective measures? Retrospective or prospective? What is the role of institutions? In our analysis of the American National Election Studies, 1956–1996, we employ a National Business Index (NBI), an aggregate measure that amalgamates individual voter perceptions of the collective economy. It outperforms other national economic measures and reveals that effects have been underestimated. The assumption of strong retrospective economic voting is tested under different institutional hypotheses. Contrary to expectations, it is not found to be influenced by divided government, but it is heavily influenced by incumbency, meaning in practice whether a popularly elected president is running. Moreover, this incumbency variable highly conditions the time horizon of national economic voting. When a popularly elected president is not running, such voting is almost entirely prospective. These conditional effects go a long way toward explaining certain enduring controversies in the literature.
This article examines the cognitive foundations of economic voting in four diverse democratic electorates: Canada, Hungary, Mexico, and Taiwan. We present a theory of heterogeneous attribution, where an individual's level of political sophistication conditions his or her ability to attribute responsibility for economic conditions to governmental actors. In contrast to previous literature, we argue that higher, not lower, levels of political sophistication prompt citizens to “vote their pocketbook.” Using data from surveys done in conjunction with recent elections in all of these countries, we find that more politically sophisticated respondents are more likely to make use of pocketbook evaluations in their decisions to support or oppose the incumbent government. These findings both present a significant challenge to the conventional wisdom on political sophistication and economic voting and shed light on the necessary cognitive preconditions for democratic accountability.
Comparative analyses of economic voting in Europe and in the American states suggest that institutional context structures the assignment of political responsibility for policy outcomes. Since most of it has proceeded at the aggregate level, however, the extant literature is ill equipped to comment critically on the ability of individuals to incorporate information about institutional context into their responsibility judgments and on whether the effects of such contextual factors outweigh those of individual-level characteristics. This article analyzes attributions of executive versus legislative responsibility for fiscal policy outcomes in the American states and represents the first attempt to integrate both institutional context and responsibility attributions into a single analysis. Exploiting recent advances in multilevel modeling techniques, this article analyzes the extent to which individuals’ responsibility judgments are shaped by institutional and individual-level factors and how, in turn, these responsibility judgments influence political evaluations.
Many contend that President Bush's reelection and increased vote share in 2004 prove that the Iraq War was either electorally irrelevant or aided him. We present contrary evidence. Focusing on the change in Bush's 2004 showing compared to 2000, we discover that Iraq casualties from a state significantly depressed the President's vote share there. We infer that were it not for the approximately 10,000 U.S. dead and wounded by Election Day, Bush would have won nearly 2% more of the national popular vote, carrying several additional states and winning decisively. Such a result would have been close to forecasts based on models that did not include war impacts. Casualty effects are largest in “blue” states. In contrast, National Guard/Reservist call-ups had no impact beyond the main casualty effect. We discuss implications for both the election modeling enterprise and the debate over the “casualty sensitivity” of the U.S. public.
Although partisan swing is often assumed to be uniform across congressional districts, our analysis of the 2006 House elections demonstrates that systematic variation exists. In addition to incumbency status, partisanship, spending, and scandal, variation in the local salience of national issues across districts affects vote shifts in these districts. Notably, partisan swing in Republican districts proved highly sensitive to the number of Iraq war deaths from that district and, to a lesser degree, to the roll-call vote of Republican House members on the war resolution. These findings have implications for theories of anticipatory representation, retrospective voting, and electoral accountability.
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, widespread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.
This analysis shows that the intergovernmental response to Hurricane Katrina collapsed because those involved in the process did not have a clear understanding of their own roles and responsibilities or how the entire governmental response system should operate. New data are presented which demonstrate that citizens' attitudes about intergovernmental responsibilities coincide quite closely with how the disaster response system is designed to function, but they differ from the way public officials involved in the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts thought the process should work. This mismatch between what various levels of government are expected to do and what activities they actually perform in emergency situations has contributed to extremely negative impressions within the American public about governmental performance during natural disasters. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.
This monumental study is a comprehensive critical survey of the policy preferences of the American public, and will be the definitive work on American public opinion for some time to come. Drawing on an enormous body of public opinion data, Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro provide the richest available portrait of the political views of Americans, from the 1930's to 1990. They not only cover all types of domestic and foreign policy issues, but also consider how opinions vary by age, gender, race, region, and the like. The authors unequivocally demonstrate that, notwithstanding fluctuations in the opinions of individuals, collective public opinion is remarkably coherent: it reflects a stable system of values shared by the majority of Americans and it responds sensitively to new events, arguments, and information reported in the mass media. While documenting some alarming case of manipulation, Page and Shapiro solidly establish the soundness and value of collective political opinion. The Rational Public provides a wealth of information about what we as a nation have wanted from government, how we have changed our minds over the years, and why. For anyone interested in the short- and long-term trends in Americans' policy preferences, or eager to learn what Americans have thought about issues ranging from racial equality to the MX missile, welfare to abortion, this book offers by far the most sophisticated and detailed treatment available.
This report is one of a series of publications that summarize and synthesize information collected by the Disaster Research Center as part of its ongoing assessment of the Project Impact (PI) implementation process. The data presented here were gathered in four focus group discussions that were held doing the 2000 Project Impact Summit. Twenty-six representatives from Project Impact communities around the U. S. took part in those discussions. The data that were collected in 2000 complement other focus group data that were gathered using the same methodology in 1998 and 1999. All group members took part in the discussions with the understanding that the information they provided would be treated as confidential. Discussions were tape-recorded; the tapes were later transcribed to facilitate analysis. The focus group discussions were designed to obtain Project Impact participants’ views on the PI implementation process. Group members were asked to offer observations and insights on the following topics: Community-based strategies for achieving disaster resistance The organization of local Project Impact initiatives Strategies for building disaster mitigation partnerships with diverse segments of the community What communities would like FEMA to do to facilitate program implementation Expectations with respect to the future of Project Impact when initial funding comes to an end
The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand. Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.
The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.