Existing scholarship links involuntary police contact to political withdrawal, but many high-crime, disadvantaged communities suffer from a shortage of police protection in addition to its excesses. Whether policing that responds to this insecurity mobilizes or demobilizes these communities, and whether these responses depend on how officers police, is not clear. I examine these questions by linking individual voter records to the Jacksonville Hotspots Experiment, which randomized police deployments and tactics across high-crime neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods received high-intensity patrols that generated many stops and arrests; others received patrols emphasizing non-enforcement, community-oriented tactics; while a control group experienced no changes. Both the high- and low-enforcement interventions raised turnout in subsequent elections by 2 to 4 percentage points, concentrated in the highest-crime areas. The results suggest that visible police responses to community violence can mobilize political engagement, complicating accounts that center punitive contact as the primary way policing shapes political life.

Aggressive police tactics have expanded definitions of criminal behavior, empowered officers to stop and detain people on thin pretexts, and led to the pervasive surveillance of entire neighborhoods. But the political effects of these forms of criminalization remain poorly understood. I leverage within-neighborhood variation in exposure to a series of anti-gang crackdowns in Los Angeles that expanded the criminal code and lowered the standard of suspicion for police stops within court-ordered safety zones. Using administrative data on voting, a geocoded panel survey, and a difference-in-difference design, I find that these crackdowns generated large, durable increases in voter registration, turnout, and civic engagement. Mobilization was concentrated among Black, Latino, and young people and accompanied by significant increases in support for criminal justice reform, consistent with backlash to policing seen as racially targeted. The results highlight how visible, traceable forms of punitive policing can push highly policed communities toward political engagement.

Televised political commentary offers a prominent venue for elites to interact with one another, modeling political talk for large numbers of viewers. When do televised discussions between political pundits reproduce or mitigate gender inequality? Extending prior work on descriptive representation and decision rules in formal deliberative settings, we examine the participatory consequences of gender composition and conversational norms on over 6,000 informal, panel-style discussions that aired on American television news between 2000 and 2017. We find that on "debate-style" programs that foster majoritarian conversational norms, women speak more and are shown greater respect as their share of the discussion group increases. These relationships are attenuated on shows with consensus-oriented conversational norms. Our findings highlight how certain features of political television programming—namely a lack of descriptive representation and a focus on conflict—may contribute to gender inequality, setting problematic behavioral norms for the public to emulate.

Cues sent by political elites are known to influence public attitudes and behavior. Polarization in elite rhetoric may hinder effective responses to public health crises, when accurate information and rapid behavioral change can save lives. We examine polarization in cues sent to the public by current members of the U.S. House and Senate during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, measuring polarization as the ability to correctly classify the partisanship of tweets’ authors based solely on the text and the dates they were sent. We find that Democrats discussed the crisis more frequently–emphasizing threats to public health and American workers–while Republicans placed greater emphasis on China and businesses. Polarization in elite discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic peaked in mid-February—weeks after the first confirmed case in the United States—and continued into March. These divergent cues correspond with a partisan divide in the public’s early reaction to the crisis.