Angie Heeyoung Jo

Abstract:   Welfare states differ significantly in their design and generosity in normal times, but systematic differences in their response to collective crises remain understudied.  My first dissertation 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 this outsized Liberal response.  First, Liberal governments inherit weak infrastructural power for aid transmission—lacking precise data, delivery systems, and administrative capacity—which inflates spending volume through inefficiency.  Second, Liberal governments operate with a politics of discretion that favors temporary relief policies designed to disappear, rather than durable expansions.  These factors favor broad, temporary cash transfers and tax credits over more targeted or institutionalized interventions, producing a short-term “spike” in fiscal spending.  By contrast, Social Democratic regimes “smooth” shocks through existing, high-capacity institutions, scaling up established programs rather than inventing new ones.  I use OLS regression, PCA, and case studies of the United States, Germany, and Denmark to illustrate how everyday welfare state institutions constrain and shape the menu of policy options available in crisis.

Abstract:   My second dissertation paper turns to the United States—the archetypal Liberal case—to probe the long-term consequences of such short-term interventions.  It 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:   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:   My third dissertation paper extends the project's central question—how Liberal regime states learn and build capacity, or fail to do so, from crisis to crisis—by shifting from rare, high-intensity shocks to recurrent risks that repeatedly affect the same regions over time.   Whereas Papers 1 and 2 examine centralized, high-resource crisis responses, this paper focuses on a setting characterized by decentralization, fiscal constraint, and direct public engagement:  localized and repeated natural disasters.  I study variation across counties along the Guadalupe River in Central Texas, part of “flash flood alley,” where severe flooding has recurred for nearly a century (notably in 1932, 1978, 1987, and 2025).  These events are deeply embedded in local memory, including tragedies such as the 1987 bus washout and the July 4th 2025 flooding of Camp Mystic that killed twenty-five youth summer campers.  Despite facing the same underlying risk, counties along the river vary substantially in whether they invest in mitigation infrastructure such as flood warning systems, whether they persist through failed grant applications or political opposition, and whether they ultimately succeed in building protective capacity.  The paper asks: when risks are repeated, predictable, and concentrated, why do some governments successfully invest in long-term protection while others remain reactive?  Building on the concept of institutional scarring, I argue that repeated crises do not necessarily produce learning.  Instead, intermediate failures—unsuccessful grant applications, political opposition to visible infrastructure, and “near misses”—can generate negative feedback loops that demobilize policymakers and publics even as risks remain salient.  Theoretically, this speaks to the problem of governing for the long term and to broader questions of temporality and self-undermining feedback effects.  While existing frameworks suggest that predictable risks and visible benefits should facilitate investment, the Guadalupe River case reveals substantial variation and recurrent risk without institutional learning.  By examining crisis governance under conditions of recurrence, this paper highlights a different mode of the crisis welfare state that is not centered on rapid, centralized emergency spending at the federal and state levels, but on the slow, contested construction of durable capacity at local levels, and shows that even when opportunities for learning from crisis appear strongest, states may still fail to build long-term protection.

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.  

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.