Electing Punishment: Interest Group Capture in District Attorney Elections

• In Event: Who Gets to Contest Local Elections?: Gatekeepers and Representation

Abstract

Discretionary decisions by District Attorneys (DAs) to file long lists of charges, seek long sentences, and aggressively negotiate plea deals bear significant responsibility for both the magnitude and the racial inequities of mass incarceration (Pfaff 2017, Zimring 2020). Almost all DAs are elected officials, and previous research has found that off-cycle local elections -- those elections which do not coincide with any statewide elections -- are effectively captured by the municipal employees whose salary and benefits depend on who gets elected to local offices (Anzia 2014). To date, no one has investigated whether the same might be true of off-cycle DA elections and the victim's rights and law enforcement groups who support punitive prosecution policies. In this paper, we provide the first scholarly presentation of information about where and how many off-cycle DA elections there are (about 20% of them, in seven U.S. states). Then, we analyze a newly created panel dataset of American counties which includes extensive demographic, political, and economic information, information about prison admissions, and information about DA term lengths and election cycles, along with turnout and vote share information for a subset of recent DA elections. We find that, even when controlling for county partisanship and demographics, counties that hold off-cycle DA elections have significantly greater annual average prison admissions than counties that hold on-cycle DA elections. Furthermore, we find that this effect is much larger in states where collective bargaining by law enforcement unions is legally permitted, which provides evidence that these groups are indeed capturing off-cycle DA elections.

Authors

• Rebecca Goldstein, University of California, Berkeley

• Katarina Jensen, University of California, Berkeley