When Badge Trumps Party: Partisanship at the "Thin Blue Line”

• In Event: The Politics of Policing: Partisanship, Race, and Law Enforcement in the City

Abstract

How partisan is local government? This paper provides insights from a pervasive and powerful institution across US states -- the elected Sheriff. Sheriffs are typically elected in partisan elections and tasked primarily with jail administration and policing. As constitutional officers, elected Sheriffs have substantial discretion in hiring-and-firing of officers and orchestrating police policy. Does the political party affiliation of Sheriffs affect how their agencies operate? Using both a regression discontinuity design -- identified by the as-if random assignment of Democratic Sheriffs who barely won -- and a difference-in-differences design -- identified by party switches over time within a county -- I find no evidence that the party of the Sheriff shapes rates of arrests for drug crimes, discretionary misdemeanor offenses, or violent crimes. Though arrest rates vary widely across jurisdictions, partisanship does not structure this variation. These findings provide an important counterexample to the widespread phenomenon of the "nationalization of politics" in the US.

Author

• Michael James Zoorob, Harvard University