Public Safety Unions’ Influence in Local Elections: Evidence from U.S. Cities

• In Event: Perspectives on American Political Economy

Abstract

The goal of this project is to investigate the role of public safety unions in lobbying local politicians, and how this affects U.S. local governments’ budgetary decisions, performance on public safety issues, and police conduct. As noted by Anzia (2022), despite a surge in attention to local policies governing public safety issues, scholars have largely ignored the role that unions of police officers and firefighters play in determining these policies. Our project has two objectives. First, we have collected data on local unions’ involvement in local campaign finance for a sample of 1,135 mayoral races from 1990 to 2019. This allows us to establish a set of new descriptive facts on the involvement of public safety unions in funding local elections. Second, we leverage a close election regression discontinuity design to study how budgetary outcomes and performance on public safety issues differ in cities in which the mayor’s campaign was funded by unions.

Authors

• Maria Carreri, Bocconi University

• Edoardo Teso, Harvard University

• Rui Yu, University of Pennsylvania