Political Subculture: A Resilience Modifier
Abstract
With the number and severity of disasters seemingly on the rise, there is an increased call for enhancing resilience to mitigate the post-event costs. Resilience is widely known to revolve around the demography, geography, sociology, and economy of the area under study. What is not known is what other factors have multiplicative effects on the overall resilience of communities. One potential factor in this equation is political subculture, Dr. Daniel Elazar's term for the cultural stance of a community with regards to views on government and politics and their role in the society. In seeking to discover whether political subculture affects the resilience of a community, the author proposes to use analysis of disaster case studies from three representative communities -- each highlighting one of Dr. Elazar's three subcultures of Traditional, Individual, and Moral -- to determine whether pre-evaluated resilience values and predicted response to disaster coincide with actual event outcomes. By using the Social Vulnerability Index values established by Dr. Susan Cutter as a baseline metric for a quantifiable measure of resilience, the author found that political subculture does alter the predicted outcome and should be further researched as a potential modifier of planned resilience and response.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA551883
Entities
People
- Gordon S. Hunter
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School