Exposure to conservative news causes judges to impose harsher criminal sentences. Our evidence comes from an instrumental variables analysis, where randomness in television channel positioning across localities induces exogenous variation in exposure to Fox News Channel. These treatment data on news viewership are taken to outcomes data on almost 7 million criminal sentencing decisions in the United States for the years 2005-2017. Higher Fox News viewership increases incarceration length, and the effect is stronger for black defendants and for drug-related crimes. We can rule out changes in the behavior of police, prosecutors, or potential offenders as significant drivers. Consistent with changes in voter attitudes as the key mechanism, the effect on sentencing harshness is observed for elected, but not appointed, judges.

This paper investigates the role of national institutions on the persistence of cultural norms and traditions. In particular, I examine why the harmful tradition of female genital mutilation persists in certain African countries while in others it has been eradicated. I argue that people are more willing to abandon their cultural norms and traditions if they are confident that the government is durable enough to set up longterm replacements for them. I exploit the fact that ethnic groups in Africa were artificially partitioned by national borders and, using a country-ethnicity panel dataset spanning 23 countries from 1970 to 2013, I show that a one-standard-deviation larger increase in political regime durability leads to a 0.1-standard-deviation larger decline in the share of newly-circumcised women, conditional on the presence of an anti-FGM government policy.

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