Race in the War on Drugs: The Social Consequences of Presidential Rhetoric

Jeff Yates and Andrew B. Whitford

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 2009, vol. 6, issue 4, 874-898

Abstract: One of the president's main leadership tools for influencing the direction of U.S. legal policy is public rhetoric. Numerous studies have examined the president's use of the “bully pulpit” to lead policy by influencing Congress or public opinion, or by changing the behavior of public agencies. We argue that the president can use rhetoric to change the behavior of public agencies and that this can have important social consequences. We focus on the disproportionate impact of presidential rhetoric on different “target populations” in the context of the War on Drugs. Specifically, we observe that presidential rhetoric had a greater impact on state arrest rates for African Americans than for whites, even when controlling for alternative explanations. These findings suggest that presidential rhetoric is filtered through social constructions of public policy problems when public officials act on them.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-1461.2009.01163.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:empleg:v:6:y:2009:i:4:p:874-898

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Empirical Legal Studies from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().