Houses of Moral Suasion: Between Rehabilitation and Punishment

This article traces the conceptual, legal, and institutional development of Korean “houses of moral suasion” by exploring the example of the first such institution, the Yŏnghŭng School, founded in 1923. The appearance of houses of moral suasion in this era showcases the institutionalization of children deemed problematic and thus undesirable. The idea of rescuing and disciplining children became interconnected and conflated as these children were conceived of as both victims and threats, a process of othering that defined them as simultaneously needy and problematic. In dealing with children, social work aimed to be both disciplinary and protective, and the discourse surrounding the institutionalization of vulnerable children demonstrated the methods through which Korean society criminalized, disciplined, and corrected marginalized children. The link between vagrant or orphaned children and delinquency can be read as a fundamental reordering of the relationship between modern disciplinary power and marginalized children. This in turn reinforced the regulatory approach to undesirable children more generally in colonial Korea.

Don’t @ Me: Experimentally Reducing Partisan Incivility on Twitter

I conduct an experiment which examines the impact of moral suasion on partisans engaged in uncivil arguments. Partisans often respond in vitriolic ways to politicians they disagree with, and this can engender hateful responses from partisans from the other side. This phenomenon was especially common during the contentious 2016 US Presidential Election. Using Twitter accounts that I controlled, I sanctioned people engaged partisan incivility in October 2016. I found that messages containing moral suasion were more effective at reducing incivility than were messages with no moral content in the first week post-treatment. There were no significant treatment effects in the first day post-treatment, emphasizing the need for research designs that measure effect duration. The type of moral suasion employed, however, did not have the expected differential effect on either Republicans or Democrats. These effects were significantly moderated by the anonymity of the subjects.