Replication Data for: Ready When the Big One Comes? Natural Disasters and Mass Support for Preparedness Investment

Societies can address collective threats such as natural disasters or pandemics by investing in preparedness (ex ante) or by offering compensation after an adverse event has occurred (ex post). What explains which of these options voters prefer? We study how personal exposure and policy knowledge affect mass support for long-term disaster preparedness, a type of long-term investment meant to cope with an increasingly destructive and frequent class of events. We first assess whether support for preparedness reflects personal experience and find that neither subjective nor geo-coded measures of disaster exposure predict policy preferences. Second, we explore whether this finding can be explained by misperceptions about the features of the available policy options. We find that revealing the damage reductions associated with preparedness strongly reduces opposition to long-term investment. These results suggest that opposition to preparing for collective threats may depend more on informational deficiencies than on personal experience with realized risks.社会可通过事前（ex ante）开展防灾准备投入，或在灾害事件发生后提供补偿（ex post）的方式，应对自然灾害、大流行病等集体威胁。那么，究竟是何种因素决定了选民对这两类方案的偏好？本研究聚焦于个人灾害经历与政策认知如何影响民众对长期防灾准备的支持度——此类长期投资旨在应对破坏性愈发显著、发生频率愈发升高的一类灾害事件。我们首先验证了防灾支持是否与个人经历相关，结果显示，无论是主观感知的灾害暴露程度，还是经地理编码（geo-coded）的客观灾害暴露指标，均无法有效预测民众的政策偏好。其次，我们探究了该研究结果是否可通过公众对现有政策选项的特征认知偏差加以解释。研究发现，披露防灾准备所能实现的减灾效益，可显著降低民众对长期防灾投资的反对态度。上述结果表明，民众对集体威胁防灾准备的反对，或许更多源于信息认知不足，而非个体对实际发生风险的亲身经历。