The partisanship of mayors has no detectable effect on police spending, police employment, crime, or arrests

2025/01/15 by Justin De Benedictis-Kessner, Matthew Harvey, Daniel B. Jones +1 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Crime Patterns and Interventions #Policing Practices and Perceptions #Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis

paper · doi:10.1126/sciadv.adq8052

openalex publication_date 2025/01/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22

Abstract

In this paper, we examine whether mayors' partisan affiliations lead to differences in crime and policing. We use a large new dataset on mayoral elections and three different modern causal inference research designs (a regression discontinuity design centered around close elections and two robust difference-in-differences methods) to determine the causal effect of mayoral partisanship on crime, arrests, and racial differences in arrest patterns in medium and large US cities. We find no evidence that mayoral partisanship affects police employment or expenditures, police force or leadership demographics, overall crime rates, or numbers of arrests. At the same time, we find some suggestive evidence that mayoral partisanship may modestly affect the racial composition of arrests. Overall, the results from our multimethod analyses indicate that local partisan politics has little causal impact on crime and policing.

Citations

• Robust Nonparametric Confidence Intervals for Regression-Discontinuity Designs
• The Impact of Race on Policing and Arrests
• On the Validity of the Regression Discontinuity Design for Estimating Electoral Effects: New Evidence from Over 40,000 Close Races
• Difference-in-differences with variation in treatment timing
• The Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures
• A Practical Guide to Counterfactual Estimators for Causal Inference with Time‐Series Cross‐Sectional Data
• On the reliability of published findings using the regression discontinuity design in political science
• The Politics of Police

Discussions

• Researchers found NO evidence that a mayor’s political party (D or R) affects crime rates, police funding, or arrests in US cities. Politicians talk big, but data speaks louder. 📊 doi.org/10.1126/sci [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]

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