Can media coverage of a terrorist organization encourage their execution of further attacks? This paper analyzes the day-to-day news coverage of Al-Qaeda on US television since 9/11 and the group's terrorist strikes. To isolate causality, I use disaster deaths worldwide as an exogenous variation...

This paper examines changes in public attitudes towards refugees across Britain over almost three decades using data from British Social Attitudes Surveys. It therefore covers the period when immigration as a whole has increased and the number of asylum applications reached their highest levels....

Hostility towards minorities may sometimes have economic rather than racial motives. Labour market fears, or concerns about the welfare system, are often believed to manifest themselves in hostile attitudes towards population groups that are considered to be competitors for these resources. The...

This article examines the hypothesis that having daughters polarises male politicians' attitudes toward abortion rights. Using French and U.S voting records, I estimate that having daughters decreases support for abortion law by 25% for right-wing congressmen in France, and increases support for...

There were large regional differentials in the Brexit vote. Most notably, the percentage voting to leave the EU ranged from 38% in Scotland and 40% in London to 59% in the East and West Midlands. Turnout also varied across Britain, from a low of 67% in Scotland to 77% in the South East and South...

Public opinion influences politicians, and therefore influences public policy decisions. What are the roles of self-interest, knowledge, and ideology in public opinion formation? And how do people learn about economic issues? Using a new, specially-designed survey, we find that most respondents...

We study the impact of the first American party committed to redistribution from rich to poor on anti-Black media content in the 1890s. The Populist Party sought support among poor farmers, regardless of race, providing the segregationist Democratic establishment in the South with an incentive...

The internet and other large textual databases contain billions of documents: is there useful information in the number of documents written about different topics? We propose, based on the premise that the occurrence of a phenomenon increases the likelihood that people write about it, that the...

The Immigration Act of 1965 marked a dramatic shift in policy and one with major long term consequences for the volume and composition of immigration to the United States. Here we explore the political economy of a reform that has been overshadowed by the Civil Rights and Great Society programs....