Patrick Roberts

Patrick Roberts has a lifelong fascination with how governments manage emergencies. He’s also interested in how sometimes, when the wheels fall off, bureaucrats speak back to politicians. This began when he grew up along the Texas gulf coast and helped protect homes against hurricane winds and rain. After disaster struck, he noticed how mayors always seemed to blame the state and federal government, the federal government pointed the finger at localities, and everyone blamed bureaucrats. Somehow, the president was assumed to be the responder in chief. Roberts wondered why.

His first career was an Associated Press reporter, where he covered ice storms, floods, and New York state politics. Reporting on day-to-day events stoked his curiosity about why emergencies unfold, and why disaster policy always seems to respond to events rather than anticipate them.

His research traces the development of disaster and security organizations and their capacity, performance and especially their degree of autonomy, or ability to develop and pursue a perspective independent of the will of elected politicians and interests. Organizational autonomy is particularly important given the thickening layers of bureaucracy and increasingly coordinated agendas in contemporary politics. The idea also complements the emerging literature on networks.

Roberts is the author of Disasters and the American State: How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Public Prepare for the Unexpected (Cambridge, 2013). He has published in a variety of scholarly and popular journals. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States Naval Laboratories, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Social Science Research Council. He serves on the editorial board of Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy.

He has served as a senior foreign policy advisor in the State Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, funded by a Council on Foreign Relations Stanton International Affairs Fellowship. He has also been the Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Heidelberg Center for American Studies in Germany.

His research has been funded by a variety of organizations who all have a mission of advancing knowledge of how bureaucrats, politicians, and the public can work together to reduce risk. Roberts is always excited about partnerships with organizations focused managing disaster and security organizations, as well as those who would benefit from fresh thinking in the form of student projects.

Roberts holds a Ph.D. in government from the University of Virginia. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow, one at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and another at the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University.