Abstract:   Welfare states differ significantly in their design and generosity in normal times, but systematic differences in their response to collective crises remain understudied.  This paper examines a puzzling relationship between baseline social spending and discretionary fiscal response to COVID-19: countries empirically cluster by welfare regime (Esping-Andersen 1990), rather than welfare state size, government partisanship, or fiscal capacity.  In particular, Liberal states vastly overspent on the crisis, relative to their own baselines and other low spenders, while Social Democratic states underspent.  I theorize two supply-side mechanisms behind the outsized Liberal response.  First, Liberal governments inherit weak infrastructural power for aid transmission, which inflates volume through inefficiency.  Second, Liberal governments operate with a politics of discretion to deliver temporary relief policies that are designed to disappear.  These factors favour broad, temporary cash transfers over alternative policies, causing a short-term “spike” in fiscal spending in Liberal countries, whereas Social Democratic states “smooth” their spending across normal times and crisis times.  I use OLS regression, principal components analysis, and case studies of the United States, Germany, and Denmark to illustrate how their everyday welfare states come to constrain and complement their menu of options in crisis. 

Abstract:   How does crisis response shape long-term welfare state capacity in the American safety net?  This paper examines whether large infusions of discretionary federal emergency aid leave durable institutional legacies or simply fade as temporary liquidity relief.  Focusing on the domain of housing debt, I analyze two structurally comparable foreclosure prevention programs enacted ten years apart: the $9.6 billion Hardest Hit Fund (2010) and the $9.6 billion Homeowner Assistance Fund (2021).  Both programs gave state housing finance agencies discretion to design foreclosure prevention interventions ranging from short-term mortgage payment assistance (administratively easier and politically less contentious but temporary) to long-term debt restructuring, which was more challenging but addressed structural unaffordability.  Using a mixed-methods design, including within- and between-group quantitative comparisons across states and over 30 interviews with former policymakers, I find that prior exposure to HHF did not increase states’ likelihood of pursuing more ambitious debt restructuring under HAF.  Even agencies that built loan-modification infrastructure during the Financial Crisis rarely carried it forward to COVID times.  This lack of cumulative learning reflects a crucial distinction between crisis capacity—the ad hoc infrastructures built under emergency conditions with temporary resources—and core capacity, the enduring administrative competence that persists across crises.  Qualitative evidence shows that while federal crisis funds provided discretion and resources, they did not align the political support or institutional coordination necessary for structural reform.  I theorize this as a form of negative policy feedback called “institutional scarring”: ambitious but under-supported reform efforts can deplete capacity and political will, leaving agencies more cautious, not more capable, in future crises.  These findings suggest that without federal alignment and underlying state capacity, discretionary crisis spending from federal to state levels is unlikely to yield lasting welfare state expansion or meaningful policy learning from crisis to crisis. 

Abstract:   Recurrent natural disasters generate abundant state activity, but do they build durable protective capacity?  This paper develops a theory of serial policy investment under conditions of recurrent risk through a longitudinal study of flood-warning governance in Kerr County, Texas, with structured comparisons to neighbouring counties along the Guadalupe River.  I argue that cumulative protective capacity requires three distinct political accomplishments: converting temporary crisis-generated flows into durable component stocks; integrating complementary components into an end-to-end operational system; and maintaining that system after the precipitating crisis fades.  Drawing on an original corpus of county and river-authority meeting records, a historical flood chronology, and process tracing from 1950 through June 2026, I show that Kerr repeatedly approached these thresholds without crossing them.  I theorize that in multi-level disaster regimes, especially within the American system of fiscal federalism, repeated opportunities to obtain outside funding can sustain a politics of almost-investment via renewable externalization: local governments continue planning and accumulating components while postponing locally costly commitments.  The result is a perverse feature of disaster federalism:  the event that makes protection most politically and fiscally feasible may be the same event that protection was supposed to precede.  Exiting this cycle requires political underwriting—a durable coalition or governing settlement that allocates the full system’s costs, authority, operation, and maintenance, and aligns them with its beneficiaries.

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Abstract:   This paper introduces the concept of the crisis welfare state to describe a distinct mode of social policy expansion that emerges during rare but disruptive episodes of collective crisis.  These emergency policies—such as expanding the child tax credit and eviction and foreclosure moratoria—often reach broader populations than the everyday welfare state, temporarily extending protections to both chronically and newly vulnerable groups.  Yet they are structurally designed to expire, rolling off before underlying risks have abated and often failing to reach those most in need.  Drawing on detailed case studies of COVID-19-era housing and tax credit policy, we show how crisis welfare policies recognized new forms of vulnerability and generated substantial public resources—but also reproduced exclusion, exacerbated precarity through “crisis drift,” and left gaps increasingly filled by private credit.  Our framework expands the traditional welfare state literature, which has typically focused on long-term, institutionalized programs addressing individualized life-cycle risks.  By contrast, we center emergency, short-term interventions in response to collective shocks—events whose causes and consequences are widely shared but unevenly impacted.  In doing so, we join calls for a “bottom-up” approach to crisis politics that takes seriously the experience of those most dependent on the welfare state, and we highlight how temporary welfare expansions shape—not just reflect—patterns of institutional change, social inequality, and state capacity.

Abstract:   In 2024, the United States experienced 27 separate weather and climate disasters costing at least $1 billion each, highlighting both the rising frequency of catastrophic events and the uneven burdens of disaster response under American federalism.  While FEMA typically covers 75 percent of eligible costs under the Stafford Act, states and localities must shoulder the remainder within the constraints of balanced-budget rules, limited reserves, and varied fiscal capacity.  Federal disaster relief also interacts with state institutions—such as unemployment insurance systems—that differ sharply in generosity and eligibility, producing unequal access to programs like Disaster Unemployment Assistance.  This article presents a descriptive, bottom-up analysis of fiscal responses to the 27 billion dollar natural disasters of 2024, mapping the distribution of costs across levels of government, tracing the generosity and timing of individual benefits, and assessing how these factors shaped local recovery in terms of unemployment, debt, and homeownership.  By situating recent disasters within broader debates on fiscal federalism, crisis governance, and social policy, we highlight how federal retrenchment and subnational burden-shifting reinforce inequality in recovery. 

Abstract:   This study examines how Americans weigh competing principles—need versus personal responsibility—when evaluating government disaster aid.  Should public assistance prioritize under-resourced households lacking private protections, or those who have demonstrated preparedness through wealth, insurance, and mitigation efforts?  Using a randomized survey experiment, we present respondents with contrasting vignettes of disaster-affected households:  a high-income family that took extensive protective measures yet lost their home, and a low-income family unable to afford such protections.  Participants are asked to assess appropriate government support for each, across both short-term relief and long-term recovery policy.   Fielded across recent U.S. disaster contexts—including the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires and the October 2024 Hurricanes Helene and Milton—this study explores whether support for aid shifts based on disaster type, household demographics, or perceived severity.  Through these trade-offs, we test whether natural disasters constitute a normative “exception” to Americans’ broader preference for self-reliance—particularly when hardship is framed as unpredictable or disproportionately impacting marginalized communities.  The results shed light on public willingness to endorse redistribution in the face of shared risk, and on the boundaries of solidarity in American disaster governance.

Abstract:   This paper investigates how U.S. federal housing debt relief policy has varied in its moral framings of debtor deservingness, and how those framings translate into eligibility rules and documentation requirements across three types of collective crises:  financial, natural, and pandemic.  Building on work by Dauber (2012) on disaster relief as a legitimating force, Zackin & Thurston (2024) on the political development of debtor relief, and Strolovitch (2024) on the politics of crisis recognition and chronic precarity, I argue that two explanatory variables—(1) the political or public memory of the crisis, or its moral framing, and (2) the presence of personal policymaker memory among bureaucrats—interact to shape deservingness policy in each progressive crisis.  These forces worked in tandem to elevate forbearance—not forgiveness—as the dominant tool of mortgage debt relief by the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Drawing on interviews with senior officials from Treasury, FHFA, FHA, HUD, the GSEs, and national interest groups (servicers, lenders, and borrowers) I show how forbearance rose to prominence not only because COVID was publicly framed as akin to a natural disaster, but also because federal policymakers remembered how abstract moral concepts like “deservingness” and “hardship eligibility” had undermined earlier foreclosure prevention programs through overwhelming administrative burden.   Forbearance—refined during natural disasters in the 2010s—offered a politically neutral, operationally streamlined alternative.  Yet this convergence was not without tradeoffs.  Precisely because forbearance rests on the premise of temporary hardship, it became a policy that delays repayment but does not challenge the underlying contract of the loan itself.  As a result, more interventionist tools—such as principal reduction for permanent loan modification—were effectively taken off the table.  What emerged was a durable policy template:  light on eligibility and documentation, but also light on debt forgiveness.  While this shift reflected real administrative learning, it also reinforced the political limits of crisis-era generosity.