The Influence of Public Safety Unions in Local Elections in U.S. Cities

• In Event: The Political Economy of Local Governments and Police Departments and Unions

Abstract

Despite a surge in attention to local policies governing public safety issues, and despite “breathless news reports [that] often tabulate large sums donated by the unions to local and state candidates'' (Di Salvo 2022), scholars have largely ignored the role that unions of police officers play in in local politics and policy. More generally, evidence on campaign financing in U.S. local elections is very scant. In this project, we have put together the first large scale dataset on campaign finance in local elections, covering 1,135 mayoral races from 1990 to 2019. This allows us to 1) establish a set of new descriptive facts on the involvement of public safety unions in funding local elections, and 2) study how budgetary outcomes, performance on public safety issues, and police conduct differ in cities in which the mayor’s campaign was funded by unions. To obtain identification, we employ both a difference-in-differences design, and a close election regression discontinuity design.

Authors

• Maria Carreri, University of California Berkeley & Bocconi University

• Edoardo Teso, Harvard University

• Rui Yu, University of Pennsylvania