Race and U.S. Foreign Disaster Aid *

Abstract

While foreign aid allocation has been shown to be highly political, disaster aid specifically has not. Generally, one would assume that aid aimed at assisting victims of natural disasters would not be politically motivated. Race, however, perhaps the most volatile and disputed of political variables, is often suggested in various forums as a possibly significant factor in disaster aid allocations. This article aims to make two contributions. First, the issue of race and U.S. disaster aid allocations is addressed by coding each recipient state according to its predominant ethnic group and using that as an independent variable in the analysis of U.S. disaster assistance allocations from 1964–1995. Second, the possibility that different results might be produced by using location, specifically sub-Saharan Africa, is evaluated by substituting a geographical measure for the actual population characteristics as a coding for race. Though it was initially expected that there would be a racial bias, the findings indicate that race is not a statistically significant factor.