Max Posch

The Political Economy of Propaganda: Evidence from U.S. Newspapers, with Sebastian Ottinger, submitted

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 to fan racial outrage to alienate white voters from the Populists. Using text data from local newspapers and two estimation strategies (difference-in-differences and triple-difference), we find that stories of sexual assaults by Black men on white women became more prevalent in counties where the Populists threatened the Democratic dominance, and in Democratic newspapers only.

Do Disasters Affect the Tightness of Social Norms? new draft coming soon

I study the impact of exposure to large negative shocks on how strongly individuals pressure others to adhere to the local social norms. Combining data on the occurrences of conflicts, epidemics, and other natural disasters with large-scale survey data, I show that individuals surveyed in the weeks after a shock hits in their vicinity place more importance in norm adherence and exhibit a greater willingness to sanction norm deviations. Examining within-country variation in shocks experienced during early lifetime across cohorts, I find that the effect persists and is largest in countries with low state capacity. The results are consistent with a conceptual framework in which shocks raise the returns to social coordination, and therefore individuals respond by exerting more pressure on others to adhere to the local norms.