Politization of natural disasters: party alignment, emergency declarations, and allocation of federal resources to municipalities in Brazil

Abstract

What is the relationship between party alignment and the allocation of federal recognition and emergency resources to Brazilian municipalities? We propose that even though disasters are given by nature, politics matter for federal recognition and the amount of transfers received. The argument is that the government will benefit the aligned mayors, recognizing the emergency declarations and allocating more resources to the municipalities of the same party. Considering the Brazilian coalition presidentialism, we tested three hypotheses for political alignment: alignment with the president, with the coalition, and with the minister of the portfolio. We present an original database with emergency declarations by the municipalities and the amounts transferred for that purpose in the period from 2010 to 2015. We used Poisson regression models and a two-part model to test our hypotheses. The results indicate that declarations and emergency transfers are allocated in a way that benefits political allies at the subnational level, especially mayors aligned with the minister of the portfolio.