Criminal Justice, Inequality, and Voter Behavior

• In Event: Local Politics at the Forefront of America’s Fight for Racial Equality

Abstract

The movement for racial justice and protest of police killings in 2020 put renewed focus on the local political offices that oversee law enforcement and criminal justice. These offices – district attorneys and sheriffs, for the most part – are elected in thousands of cities and counties across the United States. Yet little work has assessed how much sheriffs and district attorneys reflect the views of the voters who elect them, as well as how much ideology and attitudes about criminal justice shape voters’ choices for these offices. As a result, the potential for substantial inequalities in representation by these officials remains largely unexamined. In this project, we conduct a comprehensive study of inequalities in local criminal justice politics. We examine Americans’ voting behavior in elections for local prosecutors and sheriffs using both election results across the country from the past decade and original surveys of Americans at the national-level and in 11 individual cities and counties. We find that attitudes about criminal justice policies have large partisan divides, and that these attitudes do shape voting decisions. Moreover, we find substantial differences in criminal justice attitudes between voters and non-voters in local elections, suggesting that inequalities in turnout may worsen effective representation. Thus, our findings demonstrate how elections fail to remedy biases in representation of attitudes about criminal justice and policing, despite the increasing salience of these biases.

Authors

• Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Harvard University

• John M. Sides, Vanderbilt University

• Christopher Warshaw, George Washington University