Full Citation
Title: Contagious Animosity in the Field: Evidence from the Federal Criminal Justice System
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2019
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Abstract: A vast literature uses ingroup biases to explain animus towards others. The notion can be extended to multi-identity societies, where social preferences are de...ned over one ingroup and multiple outgroups. We use a novel research design to recover the structure of social preferences across outgroups in a high stakes setting. We investigate whether increased animosity towards Muslims post 9-11 had spillover e¤ects on Black and Hispanic individuals in the federal criminal justice system. Using linked administrative data tracking defendants from arrest through to sentencing, our core ...nding is that as 9-11 increased animosity towards Muslims, sentence and pre-sentence outcomes for Hispanic defendants signi...cantly worsened. Outcomes for Black defendants were unchanged. We underpin a causal interpretation of our ...ndings by providing evidence in favor of the identifying assumptions underlying the research design. The ...ndings are consistent with judges and prosecutors displaying social preferences characterized by contagious animosity from Muslims to Hispanics. To understand why increased animosity towards Muslims post 9-11 could spillover onto Hispanics, we draw on work in sociology to detail how Islamophobia and immigration have become intertwined in American consciousness since the mid 1990s, but were forcefully framed together in the aftermath of 9-11. We narrow the interpretation of the results as being driven by social preference structures using decomposition analysis, and correlating sentencing di¤erentials to judge characteristics, including their race/ethnicity. Our ...ndings provide among the ...rst ...eld evidence of contagious animosity, that social preferences across outgroups are interlinked and malleable.
Url: http://brendonmcconnell.github.io/pdf/Animosity_FCJS.pdf
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Authors: McConnell, Brendon; Rasul, Imran
Publisher: University of Southampton Institutional Repository
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Crime and Deviance, Other
Countries: United States