Why Reform Stalls

Case study

Inside this project.

A concise view of the question, design, my role, method, contribution, and scope.

Question

How do justification and outrage operate as public responses to police violence, and how do those responses relate to reform discourse?

Data / design

257,401 YouTube comments from 57 widely viewed videos, plus an experiment (N=159).

My role

I conceived and led the project, including study design, data curation, analysis, validation, visualization, and writing.

Method / approach

Language classification guided by a codebook, paired with a behavioral experiment.

What it contributes

A public IPR working paper where I pair large-scale YouTube comment analysis with an experiment to study how justification and outrage relate to reform discourse around police violence.

Venue / status

Preprint / IPR working paper, Northwestern Institute for Policy Research Working Paper Series, WP-25-31, 2025. Read on IPR

Scope

This is a working paper. The classifications are interpreted through the study's conceptual framework, validation work, and experiment.