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September 17, 2025

Under the cover of disaster

In the immediate aftermath of natural disasters, members of Congress become more likely to adopt the positions of special interest donors.

Tyler Smith

Source: jpegisclair

Voters expect their elected representatives to prioritize their needs over the preferences of large campaign donors. While public scrutiny helps keep politicians accountable, it is difficult to measure the effect of public scrutiny on legislative behavior.

In a paper in the 蝌蚪网 Journal: Economic Policy, authors , , and address this challenge by examining how congressional voting patterns change during brief periods when public attention shifts away from politics. Using natural disasters as unexpected events that temporarily crowd out political news coverage, the authors provide quantitative evidence of the degree to which special interests can influence members of the US House of Representatives.

The researchers drew their conclusions from analyzing over 1,500 congressional bills between 2005 and 2017, tracking how representatives voted relative to positions taken by interest groups that had contributed to their campaigns. 

Figure 2 from the authors’ paper displays voting patterns in the seven days before and after a natural disaster.

from Kaplan et al. (2025)

The chart shows that in the three days before a disaster (days -3 to -1), representatives supported their donors' positions roughly 80 percent of the time. However, in the three days following disaster onset (days 0 to +2), this alignment jumps to approximately 86 percent, representing a 6 percentage point increase. The figure demonstrates that this effect is temporary, with voting patterns returning to normal levels by day three.

To help determine whether disasters actually reduce attention to politics, the researchers used machine learning to analyze television news content, confirming that political coverage drops significantly during the same three-day window when voting shifts occur. They also tracked mentions of individual congresspeople in local newspapers and found similar reductions in coverage.

Overall, voting patterns reveal that natural disasters create windows of opportunity for special interest influence in American politics. When hurricanes, earthquakes, and other catastrophes divert public attention from day-to-day governance, members of Congress are more likely to tilt their votes toward the preferences of their special interest donors. The results suggest that public scrutiny plays an important role in healthy democracies.