Descriptive Representation and Expectations of Police Bias in the Global South

• In Event: The Politics of Policing and Local Security Provision in the Global South

Abstract

How does ethnicity affect expectations of police behavior? For citizens in the dense cities of the Global South, the police are among the most frequently encountered arms of the state. Yet we know little about how ascriptive identities shape the way diverse urban populations view interactions with the police. This paper presents results from a survey experiment conducted with a representative sample of the population of Karachi, Pakistan, a multiethnic megacity with a history of intergroup conflict. The experiment shows that citizens are less likely to expect procedural justice from non-coethnic police officers than from coethnic ones. This effect is strongest for respondents with low perceptions of the representation of their ethnic group in the local police force. These results have implications for our understanding of state-citizen relations in weakly institutionalized contexts and the development of effective and legitimate police institutions.

Authors

• Nicholas Lyon, Stanford University

• Mashail Aman Malik, Harvard University