Gabe Lenz

I understand the fear and anger. But also:

1) It is connected to the belief that AI is fake and going to vanish, which means that critics who should be helping shape AI use through policy and collective work are sitting it out

2) Lumping all AI criticism/talk into us vs. "tech bros" doesn't help

It's amazing how much they got right.

My wonderful co-authors and link to article:
@mvinaes.bsky.social and @annamikk.bsky.social. 14/14 t.co/Ti0DdSOuwf

Building trust in the efficacy and fairness of criminal justice institutions, which were absent or weak in these regions not long ago, may help reduce violent victimization. 13/

My wonderful co-authors and link to article:
@mvinaes.bsky.social and @annamikk.bsky.social. 14/14https://t.co/Ti0DdSOuwf

We hope the article helps people realize that US violence may in part be a legacy of high-violence, weak-government regions like the Wild West, the Deep South, and the Appalachian Highlands. 12/

People from historically violent places see the world as more dangerous, trust family over police and courts to handle violence, etc. I'll put more of the survey findings in another thread soon. You can explore our homicide findings on this website. 11/ homiciderisk.github.io

To understand the mechanism, we conducted a large survey of internal white non-Hispanic. We find evidence consistent with the culture-of-honor explanation, a set of defensive strategies that kept people safe in dangerous places but put them at risk in safer ones. 10/

Our analysis focuses on white internal US born migrants because we only have enough migrants with enough variation in their historical homicide rates for our within-county (and other FE) comparisons. But we think the patterns likely apply to other groups at least at times. 9/

The national toll may large. Between 2000-17, around 27K white interstate migrants were homicide victims. If every one of them had been born in Wisconsin—one of the safest states for white Americans in the 1930s—we estimate that about 6K of those people would still be alive. 8/

We also find these homicide persistence patterns despite migrants being better educated and higher income than the people they leave behind and the people they live nearby. And we find it within migrant group education and income categoreis. 7/

With fixed effects, we find homicide persistence among every group, including married women and the elderly. E.g. 70-year-olds from Kentucky are still at higher risk of homicide in say Illinois than Massachusetts born in 70-year-olds also living in Illinois. 6/

Since we have individual-level death certificate data for millions, we examine whether this homicide persistence holds up with precise fixed effects to rule out alternative explanations, e.g., only comparing migrants within county and within age groups, sex, and marital status. Here are the Ns. 5/

We find a similar pattern for 1979-1992 and 2000-2017. Here is the 2017 data. 4/

Bivariate findings. Left: people who stayed put. Right: migrants wherever they ended up. Migrants from historically violent states remained at much higher risk even after moving. Kentuckians stand out. They remained at higher risk wherever they went (mainly the safer Midwest). 3/

We measure state historical homicide rates, our independent variable, in the 1930s. Kentucky, the Deep South, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada stand out. Since we have state of birth on death certificates starting in '59, we can look at persistence of these high rates in later periods. 2/

New paper in PNAS: Your homicide risk follows you around the country. If you’re born in the historically violent Wild West, Appalachian Highlands, or Deep South, a higher risk of violent death trails you wherever you go. 🧵1/14

Incredible parallels in this Berinsky &
@gabelenz.bsky.social paper. Politicians didn't stand up to Joe McCarthy in large part because they incorrectly inferred McCarthy/ism was extremely popular. Not standing up to McCarthy was a kind of 1950s Popularism

gated academic.oup.com/poq/article/...

Convince the other side you support democracy. They’ll be less likely to tolerate backsliding by their own side.

Research: Believing that the mass public in the opposing party supports undemocratic tactics leads people to be more supportive of undemocratic tactics themselves. Being assured that a majority of your opponents oppose such radical tactics increases support for democratic norms osf.io/my987/download

Nice work. As always, Jon is a fountain of knowledge.

Picture of Jonathan Ladd on C-SPAN's Washington Journal.

I went on Washington Journal to talk about Elon Musk and third parties. www.c-span.org/program/wash...

Exploiting a Major Blunder to Study Policy Accountability: Trump and His Covid Stance in 2020 - Political Behavior Most theories of democracy assume that voters punish politicians who pursue unpopular policies. However, empirical evidence supporting this claim remains elusive, partly because politicians strategica...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Don’t trust an observational model with a bunch of arbitrary control variables

@gabelenz.bsky.social @alexandersahn.bsky.social Lenz, Gabriel S., and Alexander Sahn. "Achieving statistical significance with control variables and without transparency." Political Analysis

doi.org/10.1017/pan....

Link to the paper link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Even though voters didn’t learn they were out of line with Trump, it’s likely that Trump lost out on the sustained increase in support that leaders around the world received in the first year or two of COVID merely, it seems, for taking the virus seriously, if ineffectively. See: t.co/2emeZLthLp

Of course, this was a close election, and it’s very possible that those who did learn and defect were pivotal in Trump’s loss.

So, will voters stand up for their policy views on Election Day? At least on this policy and for this candidate, the answer appears to be no, at least not in large numbers.

The follow-the-leader tendency is largest for WHO membership. Among Trumpers who supported membership in Aug. 2020, and who never learned Trump’s stance on it, support remained near 100% after the election. By contrast, among those who learned Trump’s stance, support fell to 45%.

Instead of punishing Trump, Trump supporters dramatically changed their views on these COVID policies. When they learned Trump’s policies, they followed the leader. :-)