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Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support? Evidence from the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot RYAN D

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Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support? Evidence from the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot RYAN D American Political Science Review, Page 1 of 17 doi:10.1017/S0003055419000340 © American Political Science Association 2019 Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support? Evidence from the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot RYAN D. ENOS Harvard University AARON R. KAUFMAN New York University, Abu Dhabi MELISSA L. SANDS University of California, Merced https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000340 . iolent protests are dramatic political events, yet we know little about the effect of these events on political behavior. While scholars typically treat violent protests as deliberate acts undertaken in V pursuit of specific goals, due to a lack of appropriate data and difficulty in causal identification, there is scant evidence of whether riots can actually increase support for these goals. Using geocoded data, we analyze measures of policy support before and after the 1992 Los Angeles riot—one of the most high-profile events of political violence in recent American history—that occurred just prior to an election. Contrary to some expectations from the academic literature and the popular press, we find that the riot caused a marked liberal shift in policy support at the polls. Investigating the sources of this shift, we find that it was likely the result of increased mobilization of both African American and white voters. Remarkably, this mobilization endures over a decade later. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms iots are political acts in which participants en- around the world, the subject of political violence has en- Rgage in violence to express grievances and at- during importance.1 tempt to spur policy change. Scholars and But can riots actually change support for policy? journalists often claim that riots cause short- and long- Measuring the effect of a riot on public support for the term changes in political mobilization, attitudes, and policies said to motivate the rioters has been, as of yet, behaviors, both among riot participants and those ex- challenging. We address this question by examining posed to the riot as observers or victims. Classic survey local shifts in referendum voting on public goods tar- evidence has demonstrated that rioters ascribe political geted at urban-dwelling racial minorities after the 1992 motivations to their actions (Sears and McConahay Los Angeles riot. We find that the riot caused a shift in 1973), and scholars have argued that the series of riots in support for allocating these goods and that much of the the 1960s caused shifts in the policy mood of the shift is attributable to changes in mobilization among American electorate that had long-term consequences both African Americans and whites. We also find that for national politics (Edsall and Edsall 1992; Manza and this mobilization persists over time, evidence that the , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at Uggen 2006; Massey and Denton 1988; Olzak, Shanahan, riot’s political consequences were long-term. and McEneaney 1996;Rieder1985;Wasow2016;Western In order to identify the effect of the riot on support for 2006). Similar claims have also been made about political local referenda, we need not assume the underlying violence in other countries (Beber, Roessler, and Scacco causes of the riot are unrelated to downstream changes 2014; De Waal, 2005; Hayes and McAllister 2001). In the in policy support. Rather, we assume the riot was ex- wake of continued violent protest in the United States and ogenously timed relative to events planned long before, 14 Jun 2019 at 12:58:24 namely, an upcoming primary election. The triggering , on event for the 1992 Los Angeles riots was a video re- cording of police brutality and the subsequent acquittal Ryan D. Enos, Professor, Department of Government, Harvard of the police officers involved. Although the riot was University, [email protected]. a nonrandom event, the timing of the video recording Aaron R. Kaufman , Assistant Professor, Division of Social and subsequent trial and conviction were unrelated to Science, New York University, Abu Dhabi, [email protected]. Melissa L. Sands , Assistant Professor, Department of Political the timing of a primary election. We combine this ex- Science, University of California, Merced, [email protected]. ogenous timing with a difference-in-differences analysis We thank Allison Anoll, Pablo Barbera,´ Lawrence Bobo, Daniel of pre- and postriot policy voting to control for secular Carpenter, Guy-Uriel E. Charles and the Duke Behavioral Economics trends in policy support. This gives our analysis causal and the Law Seminar, Anthony Fowler, Bernard Fraga, Andrew Hall, leverage not found in most previous studies of political Kasper Hansen, Daniel de Kadt, Kabir Khanna, Gary King, Gabe Lenz, violence. We further interrogate the validity of this Horacio Larreguy and the Harvard Junior Faculty working group, causal claim by examining the spatial correlation be- Harvard-Smithsonian Centerfor Astrophysics . Thomas Leeper, Jeff Lewis, Daniel Moskowitz, Jon Rogowski, David Sears, Doug Smith, Robert Ward, the Harvard Research Design tween changes in policy support and the epicenter of the Workshop, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder County Clerk’s riot. We find that these changes were much more Office, the California Statewide Database, a series of talented research strongly correlated with distance from the riot than from assistants for their invaluable contributions to this project, and to the editors and reviewers at the American Political Science Review for strengthening the manuscript. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/ 1 Weuse the terms “riot,”“violentprotest,” and “politicalviolence” to DVN/9B8HQN. describe large-scale violent protest in general, and the particular event Received: January 8, 2017; revised: March 9, 2018; accepted: in Los Angeles from April 29 to May 3, 1992. We acknowledge that https://www.cambridge.org/core December 6, 2018. other writers prefer “uprising” and similar terminology. 1 Downloaded from Ryan D. Enos, Aaron R. Kaufman, and Melissa L. Sands other locations in Los Angeles, including other African Individuals close to the riot were more likely to be American population centers. materially and psychologically impacted by the event and, as such, to be more motivated in the aftermath. Few studies have examined the localized effectiveness POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY of a riot, rather than treating the events as part of a larger phenomenon (e.g., Western 2006). While this By examining how a riot affected support for public broader focus can be valuable, it might mask differ- goods allocation, our study addresses the effectiveness ences between local and distal effects: for example, of rioting as a political activity. In doing so, we broaden https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000340 while the consensus in the literature that a riot makes . our understanding of how political activity may con- citizens unsympathetic to the rioters may be accurate tribute to policy change, a question that typically on a national scale, local opinion may become more examines more common political behaviors, such as sympathetic because of shared identity, special voting, lobbying, or nonviolent protest. While such knowledge of local circumstances, or fear of further activities are often argued to be ineffective, especially unrest. Additionally, examining the effects of a riot on for low-status groups (Gilens 2012) such as poor African national-level opinion, while potentially important, Americans, we show that violent protest is an arguably overlooks that much policy, especially in the domains efficacious political activity, insofar as it changes local 2 of welfare and education, is controlled at the local or policy support. state level. Not everyone views rioting as politically motivated https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms and not all riot participants have the same motivations. However, social scientists often view rioting as a po- litical act (e.g., Huntington 1968) and classic studies of THE 1992 LOS ANGELES RIOTS riots show that participant aims include demanding On March 3, 1991, four white Los Angeles police redress for political grievances (Sears and McConahay officers were videotaped beating an African American 1973). Scholarly examinations of the 1992 Los Angeles man named Rodney King. On April 29, 1992, a trial that riots tend to interpret the event as collective action had been relocated from Los Angeles to homoge- against poor economic and social conditions, triggered neously white Ventura County concluded with an all- by police brutality (Tierney 1994). Indeed, postriot white jury acquitting the four officers of all criminal polls indicated that 67.5% of African Americans in Los charges. Angeles County viewed the riots as a protest against Within hours of the verdict’s announcement, a series unfair conditions (Bobo et al., 1994). As such, in ad- of violent and destructive incidents occurred around dition to immediate grievances such as police brutality, the intersection of Florence Avenue and Normandie riots are often characterized as demands for policy Avenue in south central Los Angeles, a predominantly reform (Fogelson and Hill 1968). In the United States, African American neighborhood. Reminiscent of the , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at these policies include spending on public goods fi fi Watts Riots thirty years earlier, police of cers aban- bene ting the urban poor, including education, doned the area, leaving residents
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