Disastrous Discretion: Ambiguous Decision Situations Foster Political Favoritism

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of all hurricane strikes from 1965–2018. We show that biased declaration behavior is not politically affordable if a disaster is either very strong or weak, when relief provision is clearly necessary or not. However, in ambiguous situations, after medium-intensity hurricanes, presidents favor areas governed by their co-partisans. Our nonlinear estimations demonstrate that this hump-shaped alignment bias exceeds average estimates up to eightfold.