Electoral Incentives, Presidential Disaster Declarations and Federal Disaster Aid

Abstract

Maintaining a trend observed since the first Presidential declaration of a major disaster in 1953, federal disaster declarations are increasing at an increasing rate and the annual average federal expenditure on domestic disaster aid has grown at an annual average rate of two hundred fifty-five percent (255%). Owing to the discretionary authority of the incumbent President in granting gubernatorial requests for such declarations, moral hazard as well as actual losses may influence executive approval of such requests and the corresponding magnitude of aid awarded. We test, within a single empirical model of recursive choice, the hypotheses that the sequential executive decisions to grant disaster declarations and the conditional amount of aid allocated are affected by political incentives. Using a unique dataset for the period 1969-2003 that combines expenditure and approval data from FEMA, state-level demographic, fiscal, presidential and gubernatorial election data, we find, after accounting for the severity of the disaster, an incumbent president is more likely to grant gubernatorial requests for disaster declarations when facing reelection, Democratic presidents are more likely to award larger volumes of federal aid to affected states than their Republican counterparts and all presidents tend to award a larger volume of federal aid per capita to those states with a larger number of electoral votes and to those states which suffer disasters affecting a relatively greater proportional measure of their population.