The Intergenerational Transmission of Policy Feedback in the United States: Evidence From Racial Violence

Abstract

Do government actions, or inactions, committed decades (or centuries) ago toward a specific community influence how members of that community trust and perceive government today? Past government actions that extracted resources (a negative resource effect) and communicated an individual's place within American Society (a negative interpretative effect) may diminish trust. This paper explores this question by examining the relationship between the county-level lynching rate of Black Americans from 1882 to 1936 and contemporary trust in local and state governments. We find that Black individuals living in U.S. counties exposed to higher rates of historical racial violence are less trusting of their local and state governments than Black individuals living in the same state but in counties exposed to lower levels of historical racial violence. We find no such relationship for White individuals. These relationships are robust to controlling for measures of contemporary use of force by governments and government performance.