Anti-crime Operations and Civil-Military Relations: Evidence from Mexico

• In Event: Domestic Political Violence, Arrests, and Public Attitudes

Abstract

How do domestic military operations affect public attitudes toward the military? Despite growing evidence that militarization increases violence in wars against criminal groups and has negative implications for citizen security, little is known about how military operations with different goals affect citizens’ trust in the military locally. We theorize that different types of military operations evoke divergent attitudes: on the one hand, we expect that local exposure to anti-crime operations dampens citizens’ trust in the military. On the other hand, we expect that local exposure to disaster-relief operations boosts citizens’ trust in the military. To test these notions observationally, we use three sets of data from Mexico: 1) event-data on military confrontations with organized criminal groups; 2) event-data on disaster-relief operations; and 3) original data from an online experiment (N=10,000) on exposure to military personnel in Mexican municipalities. We provide evidence in support of our theory in two ways. First, we conduct several difference-in-difference analyses over time. Second, we probe causal mechanisms and support our observational findings using an image-based online experiment. Our findings suggest that different types of military interventions shift local attitudes in divergent ways. While local populations increase their support in the military after witnessing disaster-relief operations, anti-crime interventions result in a dampening in citizen trust, and the latter effect is stickier over time. This project has implications for studies on organized crime-state relations and drivers of trust in the military—as well as how direct and second-hand policy experience affect institutional trust, particularly in militarized security environments.

Authors

• Margaret Frost, University of Rhode Island

• Daniel Zizumbo-Colunga, CONAHCYT