Political Science Perspectives

Abstract

Government institutions play an important role in guiding disaster preparedness, mitigation, and recovery. In turn, political scientists have devoted considerable attention to the study of hazards and disasters, including the impact of disasters on election outcomes, the capacity of disasters to help set the crowded government agenda, the various organizational strategies used by emergency management agencies, as well as scores of other related topics. The following chapter considers three areas of political science research examining the intersection of politics, policy, and disaster. It specifically considers the literatures on policy change, myopic voting and reactive decision making, and organizational behavior. This review also considers the literature on disaster resilience, a topic that overlaps various subfields within the discipline. In addition to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each area of research, this chapter highlights a number of potentially fruitful areas of future research.