Do political considerations influence federal assistance in emergencies? In the United States, the president decides which requests for federal disaster relief are granted or denied. In my honours thesis, I studied whether a humanitarian institution, natural disaster relief, was vulnerable to politicization.
I constructed a rich dataset of major weather events and federal disaster declarations in U.S. congressional districts between 1966 and 2016 and matched it to political data. I found that presidents use disaster relief to attempt to flip seats in competitive congressional districts.
