Political Economy Workshop (Gov 3007)

Presentations given by Mitra Akhtari and Arthur Spirling. Mitra Akhtari and Frederik Schwerter - "Police Brutality and Trust" Arthur Spirling - "Democratization and Linguistic Complexity: The Effect of Franchise Extension on Parliamentary Discourse, 1832–1915" Abstract - Given that minorities in the US have lower levels of social capital than non-minorities, we explore the extent to which this gap is related to instances of police brutality. We examine the relationship between instances of police brutality from 2000 to 2005 and generalized trust, trust in police, trust in local governments, and trust in neighbors in 2006. We find that in areas where minorities compose a higher share of fatalities in police encounters, minorities trust local police and the local government less relative to non-minorities. This relationship is concentrated in areas where the share of minorities in the police force is less than the share of minorities in the general population (i.e. the police force is not representative of the minorities in the underlying population). We do not find this relationship between minority's trust and minority fatalities for measures of generalized trust. We discuss how our measures of trust and police brutality can be improved upon in the future as well as an experimental design to complement our observational data and establish a causal link between instances of police brutality and depreciation of social capital. Abstract for "Democratization and Linguistic Complexity: The Effect of Franchise Extension on Parliamentary Discourse, 1832–1915" We consider the impact of the Second Reform Act, and the doubling of the electorate it delivered, on the linguistic complexity of speeches made by members of parliament in Britain. Noting that the new voters were generally poorer and less educated than those who already enjoyed the suffrage, we hypothesize that cabinet ministers had strong incentives—relative to other members—to appeal to these new electors with simpler statements during parliamentary debates. We assess this claim with a dataset of over half a million speeches for the period between the Great Reform Act and Great War, along with methods for measuring the comprehensibility of texts—which we validate in some detail. The theorized relationship holds: ministers become statistically significantly easier to understand (on average) relative to backbenchers, and this effect occurs almost immediately after the 1868 election. We show that this result is not an artifact of new personnel in the House of Commons.