The Politics of Crime: Coercion, Prevention, and Democracy

Abstract

Who wins—and who loses—when states respond to crime? This three-paper dissertation argues that security policy is a form of distributive politics: governments distribute both protection and coercion across communities, creating winners and losers among citizens and, in turn, among the politicians who claim credit or absorb blame. Some communities receive police stations, surveillance, and prevention programs; others bear the costs of militarized enforcement, mass arrests, and crop destruction. Who gets which is shaped less by where crime is worst than by where elections are competitive, and citizens reward or punish leaders for these decisions only when they can clearly identify who is responsible. Drawing on evidence from Colombia and Brazil, these three empirical papers test this argument. The first shows that the right-wing national incumbent in Colombia disproportionately directs crime-prevention resources to electorally competitive municipalities rather than to those with the highest crime rates, and that these allocations translate into vote gains for the incumbent coalition. The second shows that exposure to Colombia's aerial coca eradication program generates electoral backlash against pro-policy presidential candidates that intensifies over successive elections, while local mayors—less clearly tied to the policy—are largely insulated from sustained punishment. The third shows that mass support for tough-on-crime policy in Brazil, although widespread, declines significantly when the policy is localized to the respondent's own neighborhood and especially when information about judicial errors and arbitrary detentions is made salient, including among right-wing constituencies most committed to punitive approaches. Employing original administrative data, recent difference-in-differences estimators robust to staggered treatment timing, a pre-registered survey experiment, and qualitative interviews with policymakers and bureaucrats, the dissertation contributes to the literatures on distributive politics, electoral accountability, and the political economy of crime in the Global South. \\