Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Politics of Local Policing

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Locally elected officials are quietly exercising more control over how residents are treated by the criminal justice system. For example, city councils and county sheriffs are deciding whether local law enforcement agents check immigration status in the course of regular policing; whether and for how long people are detained in custody for suspected immigration violations; and who enters the federal deportation pipeline. This research examines how local officials wield their authority. Do partisan politics play a role in their decision-making? Do the specific policy preferences of their constituencies? These questions are studied by collecting the first comprehensive dataset on sheriff electoral returns and on the institutional rules that constrain sheriffs, which vary dramatically across the nation and over time. The proposed work advances several research agendas in political science, law, sociology, criminology, and public policy. First, variation in local immigration enforcement is only recently being documented and explained, and the electoral motivations behind it have yet to be studied at all. Second, the project is relevant to a large academic literature on local politics and representation. For a long time, scholars in this field have argued that there is a limited role for partisan or issue-specific responsiveness in the local electoral context, though recent empirical work has produced new evidence that voters' ideological positions affect municipal governments' fiscal policy decisions. The study is the first of its kind to examine both policy preferences and partisanship in the same framework; and by doing so in a domain that is simultaneously politically charged at the national level and under jurisdictions' immediate control, it will help resolve ongoing debates about the degree and type of responsiveness that prevails in local government. Finally, the project speaks to important normative questions raised by contemporary American federalism, namely how much cross-jurisdictional variation, democratic responsiveness, and partisan politics operate in the enforcement of national laws.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.