Interdisciplinary Workshops on Politics and Policy

In September 2019, the North Carolina General Assembly redrew 57 state house districts in 28 counties by holding several lottery machine drawings that randomly picked from among various computer-simulated districting maps. These randomly chosen districting maps were then combined together and used as base maps for the state’s new House of Representatives districting plan, enacted by the General Assembly on September 17, 2019. In this paper, I analyze these randomly chosen maps from the 2019 lottery to assess the causal effect of districts’ partisan composition on voter participation. I find that electorally competitive districts cause an overall increase in voter turnout. However, voters exhibit even higher turnout increases when they are placed into a district that slightly favors their own preferred party. Republican voters are most likely to turn out when their district is electorally competitive but Republican-leaning. Likewise, Democratic voters exhibit the highest turnout rates when they are placed into Democratic-leaning districts that are still competitive. Together, these results illustrate how the partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts can significantly skew the partisan composition of the turnout electorate.

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Pyar Seth presents on a book that is an intellectual history of medical diagnoses that have been used to ‘explain away’ concerns about racialized fatalities that occur in state custody, dating from roughly the 1960s to the present. “Many of the diagnoses that I examine throughout the project (i.e. excited delirium, ganja psychosis, vegan syndrome) are not recognized by the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, and the like. Yet, these conditions still appear in autopsies, toxicology reports, death certificates, and state inquests into ‘suspicious deaths’ across the United States, Canada, Britain, and the West Indies, prompting the question: How does the medicalization of racial violence travel across the boundaries of the nation-state and what might we say about a kind of transatlantic pathologization of Black life and death? Proponents as well as skeptical members of these diagnoses oftentimes frame their concerns around the same question: Are these ‘real’ biomedical conditions? However, I argue that limiting our engagement to this question misses an opportunity to assess the constitutive relations through which medical concepts come into view and the logics that makes certain medical determinations possible. Methodologically, I blend diasporic theory with archival and ethnographic methods to understand how various biomedical practices — autopsy observations, clinical trials, medical case files, and toxicology test values — work together to infringe upon our lives and produce inequitable life chances. From these documentary techniques, I hope to craft new ways for social scientists and historians of medicine to think about the construction of biomedical accounts, the use of epidemiological information, and the transnational complexities of our healthcare systems.”

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Recent evidence from across the Global South finds that community policing does not improve citizen trust or reduce crime (Blair et al 2021). We report results from a series of experiments in a rural part of the Philippines to explore why reforms which have been widely hailed in industrialized settings fail to yield similar results in the Global South. We randomized a community policing intervention across 198 villages, and randomized the assignment of police officers across treated and untreated villages. Results suggest that citizens initially responded positively to the program and increased reporting of information to the police, but the police failed to use the information in ways that resolved citizens’ safety concerns due to a mismatch in priorities. Moreover, while police officers assigned to safe areas developed more positive attitudes about the community, officers assigned to implement community policing in particularly dangerous areas became less trusting of citizens. We draw on this and other evidence to develop an inductive theory of police-community relations and the co-production of public safety. Even when citizens and the police have positive intentions, community policing which generates citizen-police contact can inadvertently cause both sides to learn negative information about the other over time, undermining reform efforts.

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