Policing Politics: Crime and Law Enforcement During Elections

• In Event: Elections, Conflict, and Violence

Abstract

Our understanding of the role of formal and informal institutions in determining electoral violence is restricted to mostly political institutions, including political parties and candidates, authoritarian legacies, and networks of patronage. Much less is known about the role of administrative factors, in particular the role of law enforcement, in anticipating, deterring, or controlling electoral violence. In this paper, I present a set of rich descriptive statistics on the kinds of crime that occur during the election period, using administrative crime data from India over the 2008-2019 period. I then focus on the role of local law enforcement in responding to election-related spikes in crime and show that recorded crime is affected by both police deterrence and under-recording. In this way, I contribute to a more detailed understanding of what crime during elections looks like and the role of law enforcement in determining the equilibrium levels of violence that are observed at the time of elections.

Author

• Shruti Lakhtakia