Why Reform Stalls

Case study

Inside this project.

A short, scannable view of the question, the design, my role, the method I chose, and where to stop short of overclaiming.

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

Conceived and led the project; conceptualization, methodology, data curation, formal analysis, validation, investigation, visualization, and writing.

Method / approach

LLM-assisted text analysis with human conceptual framing and validation, paired with experimental reasoning.

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

What this does not show

Shown only as a Preprint / IPR working paper. I interpret the automated classifications inside a broader conceptual framework, not as self-explanatory outputs.