In the hands of a few: Disaster recovery committee networks

When disaster strikes, urban planners often rely on feedback and guidance from committees of officials, residents, and interest groups when crafting reconstruction policy. Focusing on recovery planning committees after Japan's 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters, we compile and analyze a dataset on committee membership patterns across 39 committees with 657 members. Using descriptive statistics and social network analysis, we examine 1) how community representation through membership varied among committees, and 2) in what ways did committees share members, interlinking members from certain interests groups. This study finds that community representation varies considerably among committees, negatively related to the prevalence of experts, bureaucrats, and business interests. Committee membership overlap occurred heavily along geographic boundaries, bridged by engineers and government officials. Engineers and government bureaucrats also tend to be connected to more members of the committee network than community representatives, giving them prized positions to disseminate ideas about best practices in recovery. This study underscores the importance of diversity and community representation in disaster recovery planning to facilitate equal participation, information access, and policy implementation across communities.Global Challenges (FSW

Who are the expressive voters?

Brennan and Hamlin (1998) predict that moderates are more likely to be expressive rather than instrumental voters, but do not test this hypothesis. Greene and Nelson (2002) claim to reject this, by finding that extremists are as likely to vote as moderates. We argue that Greene and Nelson's study was not a complete test of Brennan and Hamlin's hypothesis and we extend their analysis to provide a more thorough test. Our results imply that there is some evidence to suggest that extremist non-voters are less likely to be instrumentally motivated, providing some support for the predictions of Brennan and Hamlin. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Voting, Expressiveness, Extremists,