Political Campaigning, and Racial Discrimination in Arrests for Drugs

Francesco Barilari () and Diego Zambiasi
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Francesco Barilari: Trinity College Dublin

No tep0223, Economic Papers from Trinity College Dublin, Economics Department

Abstract: In this paper we show that political campaigning can influence the behavior of law enforcement officers. We follow monthly arrests for 1383 police agencies in 40 American States from January 1984 to December 1990. During these years the Presidents of the United States developed a strong rhetoric against drug abuse. The main target of the presidential rhetoric was crack cocaine, a drug that the media associated with Blacks. We implement both a difference in differences and a reduced-form-Bartik-type approach to test if exposure to the presidential rhetoric affected the behavior of law enforcement officers. We generate a novel measure of the intensity of the presidential rhetoric against drug abuse by running a topic modelling analysis of all the public papers of Presidents Reagan and Bush. We find that arrests for crack cocaine of Blacks increased more in counties more exposed to the presidential rhetoric against drug abuse --even when accounting for state specific policies and baseline differences in county characteristics--, while we find no effect for Whites. We find qualitatively similar results when considering the effect of Reagan's political rallies.

Keywords: Crackcocaine; Politicalcampaigning; Racialdiscrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J15 K42 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67 pages
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-law and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tcd:tcduee:tep0223

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