Institutional Isomorphism in Local Emergency Management: Evidence from U.S. County Emergency Activation Plans

• In Event: Institutional Dynamics in Policy: Convergence, Coordination, and Governance Under Complexity

Abstract

Local governments across the United States increasingly rely on formal emergency activation plans to coordinate responses to disasters such as extreme weather, public health crises, and infrastructure disruptions. These documents outline operational procedures, roles, and communication protocols that guide how counties mobilize resources during emergencies (Kapucu, 2006; Moynihan, 2009). Despite their importance, relatively little is known about how similar these plans are across jurisdictions or what factors drive convergence in their design. From the perspective of institutional theory, similarities in policy documents may reflect processes of institutional isomorphism, whereby organizations adopt comparable structures due to professional norms, regulatory pressures, and the diffusion of perceived best practices (DiMaggio & Powell, 1993).
This study examines the degree of similarity among county-level emergency activation plans across the United States and investigates the factors associated with that similarity. The empirical analysis uses a newly compiled dataset of the most recent emergency activation plans available for U.S. counties. Plan documents are collected from county government websites and emergency management agencies and processed to create a national corpus of county emergency activation plans. Using semantic text analysis, we measure the similarity between dyads of emergency activation plans across counties and construct a large matrix of document-to-document similarity scores (Grimmer & Stewart, 2013). These similarity measures serve as indicators of institutional isomorphism in the design of local emergency management frameworks. We then estimate regression models to identify the drivers of convergence between counties’ plans. Key explanatory variables include differences in population size, differences in document release year, geographic distance between counties, political ideology, fiscal capacity, whether counties are located within the same state, and whether they belong to the same census region. These factors capture potential channels of institutional convergence, including policy diffusion, shared regulatory environments, and regional professional networks (Shipan & Volden, 2008; Stokes Berry & Berry, 1990)
Preliminary findings show that similarity appears higher among counties that are geographically closer, politically aligned, and similar in population size and fiscal capacity. By combining institutional theory with modern semantic text analysis, this study provides new empirical evidence on policy convergence in local emergency management. The findings contribute to research on institutional isomorphism, policy diffusion, and disaster governance, while demonstrating how computational text analysis can help scholars systematically examine the structure and evolution of government policy documents.

Author

• Ali Khaleghinia, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author