Post-disaster risk management: From the perspective of policy acceptance of earthquake survivors in China

Abstract

A huge earthquake jolted Wenchuan, China, shocking the whole world. It is worth noting that the disaster brought several factors of social instability, and how to conduct social risk management effectively becomes the top priority. Whether post-disaster public policies are perceived to be reasonable and accepted by the victims plays an important role in post-disaster risk management. Therefore, exploring the impact mechanism of post-disaster public policy acceptance in earthquake-stricken region will be conducive to strengthen targeted risk management and ensure social stability. A field study was applied to the local survivors of the earthquake-stricken region, which was designed to examine the effect of procedural justice and the collective outcome favorability on post-disaster policy acceptance through hierarchical regression analysis method. The results (7V=290) indicated that perceived collective outcome favorability had larger effect on the post-disaster policy acceptance than perceived procedural justice. Furthermore, perceived procedural justice interacted with collective outcome favorability. That is procedural justice promoted policy acceptance only when people's perception of outcome was favorable to the whole survivor group; when it was unfavorable, procedural justice lost its positive effect on policy acceptance.