Ready for an interesting historical story with a somewhat surprising ending? Away we go! In 1975, a federal court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Jefferson County, KY. In order to equalize the share of minorities across schools, students were assigned to a busing schedule. In light of deep-seated racial tensions, people reacted to forced school desegregation with fierce opposition and organized protests. You've probably heard this part of the story before. Busing sparks backlash. Old hat, right? But what you maybe haven't heard before... ... is the catch in Jefferson County, KY. There the busing schedule was set up to be kind of random. People were assigned to be bused or not depending on the first letter of their last name. Here's an example of the court-ordered busing plan in Jefferson County: The adoption was staggered over last name first letters, grades, and time. The figure below shows what I mean. This sets up a unique opportunity to make causal comparisons across individuals who were forced to be bused to individuals who were as-good-as randomly similar but were not forced to be bused. Pretty cool, right? So, what effects did busing have on people's worldviews? This new working paper from Kaplan, Spenkuch, and Tuttle takes on that question. They find that whites who were bused to inner-city schools were much more likely to become Democrats and that those effects last for more than forty years later. Wow! {More figures in the thread below.}