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Abstract
Local exposure to conservative news causes judges to impose harsher criminal sentences. Our evidence comes from an instrumental variable analysis, where randomness in television channel positioning across localities induces exogenous variation in exposure to the Fox News Channel. These treatment data on news viewership are taken to outcome data on almost seven million criminal sentencing decisions in the United States for the years 2005–17. Higher Fox News viewership increases incarceration length, and the effect is stronger for Black defendants and for drug-related crimes. We can rule out changes in the behaviour of police, prosecutors or potential offenders as significant drivers. Consistent with changes in voter attitudes as the key mechanism, the effect on sentencing harshness is observed for elected (but not appointed) judges. Fox News viewership also increases self-reported beliefs about the importance of drug crime as a social problem.

This paper studies the use of emotion and reason in political discourse. Adopting computational-linguistics techniques to construct a validated text-based scale, we measure emotionality in 6 million speeches given in U.S. Congress over the years 1858-2014. Intuitively, emotionality spikes during times of war and is highest in speeches about patriotism. In the time series, emotionality was relatively low and stable in earlier years but increased significantly starting in the late 1970s. Across Congress Members, emotionality is higher for Democrats, for women, for ethnic/religious minorities, for the opposition party, and for members with ideologically extreme roll-call voting records. ; ISSN:0013-0133 ; ISSN:1468-0297

Abstract
This paper studies the use of emotion and reason in political discourse. Adopting computational-linguistics techniques to construct a validated text-based scale, we measure emotionality in six million speeches given in U.S. Congress over the years 1858–2014. Intuitively, emotionality spikes during times of war and is highest in speeches about patriotism. In the time series, emotionality was relatively low and stable in earlier years but increased significantly starting in the late 1970s. Across Congress members, emotionality is higher for Democrats, for women, for ethnic/religious minorities, for the opposition party and for members with ideologically extreme roll-call voting records.

In popular and political culture, many observers credit nearly twenty-five years of declining crime rates to the "New Policing." Breaking with a past tradition of "reactive policing," the New Policing emphasizes advanced statistical metrics, new forms of organizational accountability, and aggressive tactical enforcement of minor crimes. The existing research and scholarship on these developments have focused mostly on the nation's major cities, where concentrated populations and elevated crime rates provide pressurized laboratories for police experimentation, often in the spotlight of political scrutiny. An additional line of scholarship has looked more closely at how the tactics of the New Policing have become institutionalized in police – citizen interactions in the everyday lives of residents of poorer, often minority, and higher-crime areas of the nation's cities. These efforts have often overlooked how this New Policing has been woven into the social, political, and legal fabrics of smaller, less densely populated areas. These areas are characterized by more intimate and individualized relationships among citizens, courts, and police, as well as closely spaced local boundaries with a considerable flow of persons through administrative entities such as villages and towns. The New Policing models have had extensive reach into the everyday lives of citizens living in these areas, yet little research has been done on their effect. In popular discourse, small-town policing seems like a different world from urban policing; police – citizen interactions are both quantitatively less common and qualitatively distinct. It is an open question whether the processes of policing and the experiences of citizens in these more intimate spaces can be understood through the same framework as urban policing.

National audience ; Recent work in natural language processing represents language objects (words and documents) as dense vectors that encode the relations between those objects. This paper explores the application of these methods to legal language, with the goal of understanding judicial reasoning and the relations between judges. In an application to federal appellate courts, we show that these vectors encode information that distinguishes courts, time, and legal topics. The vectors do not reveal spatial distinctions in terms of political party or law school attended, but they do highlight generational differences across judges. We conclude the paper by outlining a range of promising future applications of these methods.

Recent work in natural language processing represents language objects (words and documents) as dense vectors that encode the relations between those objects. This paper explores the application of these methods to legal language, with the goal of understanding judicial reasoning and the relations between judges. In an application to federal appellate courts, we show that these vectors encode information that distinguishes courts, time, and legal topics. The vectors do not reveal spatial distinctions in terms of political party or law school attended, but they do highlight generational differences across judges. We conclude the paper by outlining a range of promising future applications of these methods. ; National audience