How Does a Natural Disaster Affect Voting Patterns?
John Gasper, Tepper School Associate Teaching Professor of Economics, speaks about his research on the political economy — specifically how natural disasters affect voting patterns.
Video Transcript
My general field of research is what I call political economy, or what is referred to as political economy. It's the intersection between economics and politics. So I use economic reasoning and methods to understand political and policy outcomes.
One of my papers, called "Make It Rain," is about retrospective voting and the impact of natural disasters on electoral outcomes. On one hand, we would hope that natural disasters like a hurricane or tornado shouldn't actually affect votes, because if people are rational, they understand that these things are not caused by their elected officials. They shouldn't, therefore, change any of their voting behavior. That's not what we found. We do find that acts of God affect whether they vote for an incumbent or not.
The political response both at the local level, the state level, and the federal level — all of those conditions can have voter response. So it's not just, "My house is flooded; therefore, I'm going to vote the politician out." We definitely see a relationship between those things, but we also see the kind of behavior and the responsibility of the elected officials conditioning that response. Does a governor step in or request aid? Does a president grant that aid? Does FEMA come in? How much aid is provided? All of those things more than make up for any kind of sustained damage that a household has received.
Fundamentally people look to the federal government the most in terms of their responses. If a governor request is granted then both officials are rewarded for their behavior for giving federal monies to the affected people, and if a governor requests but a president turns down and denies the aid, we see that voters rewarding a governor for requesting aid from the federal government and punishing a president for denying them aid. So from a theory of democracy point of view, we're a little concerned about democratic accountability, because people are punishing electoral officials because of damage because of a tornado. That doesn't make any sense. But yet at the same time, we do see citizens making a change based on the actions of their elected official, which gives us a whole lot of hope for democracy.