The Role of Race & Immigration in Shaping Attitudes About Disaster Assistance.

• In Event: Race and Public Policy

Abstract

Who deserves disaster assistance? As natural disasters increase in number and intensity across the United States due to climate change, disaster relief costs grow. Extreme weather events cost the United States a record $306 billion in 2017 (Brittain 2018), straining the resources of government, private sector, and non-profits. Facing this new reality, the question of who individuals believe should get government assistance becomes critical. Past studies examining beliefs of deservingness in welfare policy (e.g., Alesina et al 2001; Larsen 2007) find that often citizens’ attitudes towards race, gender, and nationality shape their sense of who is deserving of assistance. To the best of our knowledge, no study to date has examined how attitudes about race and immigration status shape individuals' attribution of aid deservingness after a climate disaster. Drawing from the environmental justice and welfare literatures, we expect social biases to drive, in part, individual's deservingness criteria. We also expect partisan affiliation, beliefs about climate change, and disaster experience to affect these assessments. We test these expectations utilizing a November 2018 national survey experiment in the United States that leverages three recent devastating hurricanes (Harvey, Maria, Irma) to see how individuals (1) determine who they believe deserves government aid (i.e., from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA) as a function of race, immigrant status, gender, belief in global warming, and disaster experience and (2) whether deservingness criteria helps explain political behavior. Our study contributes to the understanding of how social identities and biases interact with environmental beliefs and experiences to influence policy preferences in the context of public spending and budgeting priorities.

Authors

• Isabella Alcaniz, University of Maryland, College Park

• Stella M. Rouse, University of Maryland, College Park

• Ashley D. Ross, Texas A&M University at Galveston