The Politics of Hate: Understanding Political Slant in the Media and Its Relation to Hate Crime
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2018
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Haverford College. Department of Economics
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
Violent crimes such as hate crime are inherently diffcult to empirically understand. By defnition, so-called crimes of passion involve emotion and other motivations equally difficult to quantify. I examine the relationship between political slant in the media and reported rates of hate crime in order to understand how esteem, or the momentum of ideas and values, can motivate to hate crime. I run multiple specifications of a cross-sectional linear regression over 298 Core Based Statistical Areas in the US, with the rate of hate crimes reported as the dependent variable and a measurement of representative newspaper political slant from Gentzkow and Shapiro (2009) as the independent variable of interest. I find that areas served by newspapers with more Republican slant are significantly and robustly correlated with less reported hate crimes per person. However, hate crime reporting is vastly inconsistent, therefore these results are diffcult to interpret with certainty.