Suchergebnisse

"Since 2000, the Gulf Coast states - Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida - have experienced a series of hurricanes, multiple floods and severe storms, and one oil spill. These disasters have not only been numerous but also devastating. Response to and recovery from these unprecedented disasters has been fraught with missteps in management. In efforts to avoid similar failures in the future, government agencies and policy practitioners have looked to recast emergency management, and community resilience has emerged as a way for to better prevent, manage, and recover from these disasters. How is disaster resilience perceived by local government officials and translated into their disaster response and recovery efforts? Ashley D. Ross systematically explores and measures disaster resilience across the Gulf Coast to gain a better understanding of how resilience in concept is translated into disaster management practices, particularly on the local government level. In doing so, she presents disaster resilience theory to the Gulf Coast using existing data to create county-level baseline indicators of Gulf Coast disaster resilience and an original survey of county emergency managers and elected municipal officials in 60 counties and 120 municipalities across the Gulf States. The findings of the original survey measure the disaster resilience perceptions held by local government officials, which are examined to identify commonalities and differences across the set of cases"--

Given the widescale usage of resilience in disaster research and policy, it is important to assess how the concept has translated to the local level where it is purported to exist and make the most change. This study assesses resilience among county emergency managers and answers: How do county emergency managers along the Gulf Coast perceive community resilience? What factors explain these perceptions? Employing original survey data collected from 51 Gulf Coast counties, this study finds that meanings of resilience among emergency managers is as varied as those used by academics and federal government agencies. However, interpretations of resilience as "bouncing back" is most common. Regression analyses indicate the adaptive capacity, organizational capacity, and disaster experience of the counties influence resilience perceptions. Emergency managers in urban counties with low adaptive capacity and little disaster experience are more likely to say resilience is "bouncing back" while "self‐reliance" is more likely among emergency managers in rural counties and resilience as "community" is more likely among emergency managers that have fewer emergency management staff. This study has considerable implications for our understanding of community resilience as a theoretical concept and a guiding principal for federal emergency management.

While research has provided evidence that culture and institutional performance shape individual level trust in political institutions, scholars have neglected to adequately estimate the effect of political institutions and macroeconomic conditions on trust. Using data from the World Value Surveys for eleven Latin American cases, we test if countries with "partyizing" electoral systems -- those with rules that encourage voters to hold the party, not individuals, accountable for government performance -- experience lower levels of distrust in political parties and the legislature in times of poor economic conditions than those countries with "personalizing" electoral rules. Our analysis shows that the macro political and economic context largely conditions the impact of culture and institutional performance on political trust. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

AbstractRelocation has become a major thrust of hazard mitigation policy. Home buyout programs are currently the primary policy tool to facilitate permanent voluntary relocation of households out of flood‐prone areas. This study seeks to evaluate public perceptions of relocation and home buyouts to better understand: Are home buyouts perceived by the public as a means to relocate away from risk? If not—who has dissonant perceptions? An original survey of Gulf Coast residents demonstrates that about 30% of households have dissonant perceptions of home buyout programs in relation to relocation away from disaster risk. Among those with aligned perceptions, individuals with higher risk perceptions and disaster experiences are more likely to consider relocating and participating in a home buyout; the same is not evident among those with dissonant perceptions. The individual‐level factors associated with dissonant relocation‐home buyout perceptions suggest that this part of the community may be misdirecting efforts and resources dedicated for community‐wide hazard risk reduction. These findings should be used to develop more efficient policy tools to facilitate retreat from the most flood‐prone areas.

ObjectivesThis article provides an overview of how the interdisciplinary field of disaster studies contributes to the social sciences.MethodsThe following themes are explored in relation to the articles contained in the special issue: disasters are social and political phenomena that generate policy change, disasters reflect and affect democratic governance, and disasters reveal shared experience and collective identity.ResultsDisaster studies bridge the social sciences theoretically and methodologically. Given the scope of disaster impacts—across social, political, economic, ecological, and infrastructure spheres—and the policy response they garner involving public, private, and civic actors, they offer a lens by which to see society and politics in a way that no other critical events can.ConclusionDisaster studies offer important applications of social science theories and concepts that expand the field, broaden our reach as social scientists, and deepen our understanding of fundamental social processes and behaviors in meaningful ways.

ObjectiveDrawing a distinction between conditional and prevalence factors that affect immigration attitudes, we examine if the recent economic recession has influenced the Millennial Generation's attitudes about immigration, compared to non‐Millennials.MethodsEmploying data from the 2008 American National Election Study (ANES), we conduct a logit analysis to estimate the effects of theoretically relevant factors on immigration attitudes.ResultsOur findings indicate that even in the face of poor economic conditions that disproportionately impacted Millennials, this cohort's attitudes toward immigration are quite resilient. While Millennials' immigration attitudes vary across a number of determinants, overall, they are more tolerant of immigration than non‐Millennials.ConclusionMillennials' tolerance of immigration is consistent with their general liberal beliefs. This is true even under the conditional impact of economic self‐interest and the conditional and prevalence impact of culture during the recession—a time when Millennials could have been susceptible to factors mitigating their feelings toward immigrants.

Decentralization is argued to create incentives for local and regional politicians to be more responsive and accountable to their constituents, but few studies have directly tested this claim. We use survey data from Colombia to examine individual-level evaluations of the degree to which decentralization prompts citizens to view department government as more accountable. We estimate the effect of administrative, fiscal, and political decentralization, controlling for participation, political knowledge, confidence in government, education, and income on perceptions of accountability. Our results indicate that administrative and fiscal decentralization improve perceptions of accountability, while political decentralization does not. Adapted from the source document.