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DISASTROUS POLITICIANS

July 15, 2008

Bryan Caplan tells a sad tale this morning about politicians and us, the voters that enable them:

Andrew Healy, my favorite new empirical political economist, has written a bold new paper. You might have thought that disasters were "acts of God," but Healy argues that the American voter is a co-conspirator. From the abstract:
Using comprehensive data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, I show that voters reward disaster relief spending but not disaster prevention spending. This aspect of voter behavior creates a large distortion in the incentives that governments face, since the data show that prevention spending substantially reduces future damage.

The paper has some nifty graphs showing the incumbent party's vote share (and change in vote share) as a function of relief and prevention spending. The slope for relief is sharply positive; the slope for prevention is flat. Given these incentives, it's hardly surprising that politicians spend about fifteen times as much on relief (which attracts votes) as they do on prevention (which doesn't).

We're watching an example of this unfold right now. I have received a flurry of emails from Senator Harkin, who is running for re-election, boasting of disaster relief bills he is flogging through Congress. I'm pretty sure I didn't receive any releases from him about his hard work making sure that the Birdland levee would hold. Since the levee failed, causing millions of dollars worth of damage, we can assume that no such work was done. This study would predict that the Senator will be rewarded for bringing in post-disaster pork, rather than punished for neglecting the levee in the first place. The uncritical coverage of the disaster aid pork in The Newspaper Central Iowa Depends Upon is a data point in favor of Mr. Healy's conclusion.