Local Agenda Setting after Focusing Events

• In Event: Hazards, Disasters, and Their Aftermath

Abstract

Hurricanes are one of the leading causes of fatalities and damage from disasters in the United States. Those numbers are expected to increase as the intensity of hurricanes, driven by climate change, increases. The most important tools for mitigating a community’s risk from hurricanes are controlled by local governments. Despite the forecasted increase in risk, local elected officials’ attention to hazard mitigation in community planning is limited. Focusing events are an oft-cited explanation for how issues that struggle to receive attention rise on political agendas. However, the potential of focusing events to focus political attention on an issue is not always realized. Hurricanes are one type of potential focusing event that does not always result in changes in local political agendas. The literature on focusing events has understudied these non-focusing potential focusing events by selecting cases where change has occurred. Furthermore, the studies that do consider events where change does not occur are largely concerned with changes in policy and not changes in political agendas. Drawing from the literature on agenda-setting this study analyzes how community and organization characteristics might promote or constrain the agenda setting power of potential focusing events on local government political agendas. This study leverages a novel dataset of local government agenda activity drawn from public meeting agenda packets from hurricane affected localities over a 15-year timeframe. It further draws on secondary data on disaster impacts, community, and organization characteristics to understand the impact of those variables on the probability that a community’s experience with a hurricane will lead to increased attention on hazard mitigation. The study pushes the literature on focusing events forward by leveraging variation within the local government context to empirically test which factors constrain or promote the potential of focusing events to impact local political agenda activity. By highlighting the characteristics of communities that are the least likely to address hazard mitigation after experiencing a hurricane, the study also calls attention to potential opportunities for interventions to increase community resilience.

Author

• Nathan Jeschke, University of Colorado Denver