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.