Prevention or relief? Voters' support for disaster policies

Abstract

Researchers have argued that preventing disasters is more efficient than providing relief. Yet, previous scholarship has found that voters in the United States reward politicians more for relief than for prevention policies. It is unclear, however, whether they truly favour relief policies or if they are simply more aware of them. In this article we report on an experiment in which American participants read about a fictional community facing a threat of flood and then rated their support for a disaster policy. Across conditions, we manipulated whether the policy is for relief or prevention, and whether the citizens are cooperative or uncooperative with respect to government policies. We found that participants did not support relief more than prevention; in fact, they favoured prevention when citizens were uncooperative. In addition, participants were less supportive of relief for uncooperative as compared to cooperative citizens, while cooperativeness did not affect support for the prevention policy.