The Political Determinants of Police Oversight: Subnational Variation in Mexico

• In Event: Inside the Black Box: Police, Politics, and Communities

Abstract

How does politics affect police oversight? Although recent scholarship in political science has focused on analyzing the operation of police agencies, there is less research on what explains different dynamics of oversight of these agencies at the local level. Building upon recent literature, we propose how a set of factors such as partisan and electoral politics might affect oversight mechanisms of local police agencies. With newly collected disaggregated data on 2400 municipalities in Mexico from 2010 to 2018, we examine how partisan alignment between the local and national level impacts on both the presence of transparency mechanisms for the police and whether the municipal police report their actions to the judicial authority.

Authors

• Martin Macias Medellin, University of Michigan

• Kristine Eck, Uppsala University