Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Politics of Local Policing

当地民选官员正在悄悄地对刑事司法系统如何对待居民进行更多的控制。例如，市议会和县治安官正在决定当地执法人员是否在常规警务过程中检查移民身份;是否以及多长时间内因涉嫌违反移民法而被拘留;以及谁进入联邦驱逐管道。本研究考察了地方官员如何行使权力。党派政治在他们的决策中发挥作用吗？他们选区的具体政策偏好呢？这些问题是通过收集第一个全面的数据集警长选举回报和约束警长的制度规则，这在全国各地和随着时间的推移有很大的不同进行研究。拟议的工作推进了政治学，法学，社会学，犯罪学和公共政策的几个研究议程。首先，地方移民执法的变化只是最近才被记录和解释，其背后的选举动机还有待研究。第二，该项目与关于地方政治和代表性的大量学术文献有关。长期以来，这一领域的学者认为，在地方选举背景下，党派或特定问题的反应作用有限，尽管最近的实证研究产生了新的证据，选民的意识形态立场影响市政府的财政政策决定。这项研究是在同一框架内审查政策偏好和党派偏见的第一次;通过在一个在国家一级同时受到政治影响并受司法管辖区直接控制的领域这样做，它将有助于解决目前关于地方政府普遍存在的回应程度和类型的辩论。最后，该项目谈到了当代美国联邦主义提出的重要规范性问题，即在执行国家法律时，有多少跨司法管辖区的变化，民主反应和党派政治。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.