Overcoming Policy Myopia : Personal Exposure, Voter Ignorance, and Disaster Policy Preferences

Societies can address collective threats by investing in preparedness (ex ante) or by providing financial assistance after an adverse event has occurred (ex post). What explains which of these options publics prefer? Existing research suggests that personal exposure to adverse events should have powerful effects on the willingness to support preparedness investment. We study mass preferences over disaster preparedness which is meant to addresses an increasingly destructive and frequent class of events. We find that neither subjective nor geo-coded measures of disaster exposure explain policy preferences. Using two experiments we then explore whether knowledge about the economic features of preparedness investment affect voter preferences. We find that higher effectiveness and lower costs significantly increase the willingness to invest in disaster resilience. These results suggest that the ability of democracies to overcome policy myopia may depend more on voter ignorance than on whether individuals have personal experience with adverse events