Social Science Statistics Blog

Flooded Communities: Estimating the Post-Katrina Migration's Impact on Attitudes towards the Poor and African Americans

This paper uses the post-Katrina migration as a quasi-experiment to confront concerns of selection bias and measurement error that have long plagued research on environmental effects. Drawing primarily on a phone survey of 3,879 respondents, it demonstrates that despite the attention to issues of race and poverty following Hurricane Katrina, people in communities
that took in evacuees actually became less supportive of the poor, of African Americans, and of policies to help those groups. The patterns uncovered suggest that the key mechanism is not direct contact, physical proximity, or persuasion by local elites. Instead, the empirical observations accord with a new theory of environmental effects emphasizing the interaction of changing demographics and the media environment. Under the theory of politicized change, sudden changes in local demographics make demographics salient to local residents. Media coverage can convey information about these shifts and can also frame people's thinking on issues related to them.