Heterogeneous Effects in Jowei Chen's Voter Partisanship and the Effect of Distribution Spending on Political Participation

In ``Voter Partisanship and the Effect of Distributive Spending on Political Participation", Jowei Chen examines the effect of receiving FEMA disaster relief on turnout for Florida voters and finds that being treated with FEMA aid after a hurricane encourages turnout among supporters of the incumbent's party but mitigates turnout among supporters of the opposing party. We extend Chen's analysis to examine heterogeneous effects, observing that voting behavior among male Democrats and African American Republicans who applied for FEMA Aid follows a different pattern than Chen's model predicts. In addition, we observe a null effect on turnout for non African American Democrats. We also take an alternative approach to correcting for selection bias; we restrict the sample of analysis to only those who applied for FEMA aid since this is the only group that can be treated, and estimate a treatment effect on a matched sample of applicants using the Coarsened Exact Matching technique. Our results using the matching technique are very comparable to the original paper's