The Effect of Constituency-Level Partisanship on Police Response

• In Event: Polarization and Democratic Decline

Abstract

Within a liberal democracy, law enforcement’s singular mandate is to equitably uphold the rule of law. Anecdotal evidence from Britain and Germany suggests people regularly experience disparate police responses. This suggests where there is leeway, policing decisions reflect personal or institutional beliefs rather than the letter of the law. This paper empirically investigates the relationship between constituency partisanship and police response using self-published data from British territorial and German länder forces. The street-level crime data is binned according to whether it was related to charges of anti-social behaviour, public disorders, and disturbances of the peace or to other charges. The understanding is that the three prior offences are relatively ill-defined within British and German law, so police have a great deal of discretion in how they enforce these statutes. Other charges and crimes are more defined and used to establish constituency-specific baselines of police response. The coordinate data for street-level observations are then converted into a GeoDataFrame and boundary data for relevant parliamentary constituencies is obtained from the House of Commons Library and the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA), respectively. As a result, every crime is situated within a constituency and every constituency is automatically assigned partisanship along a left-right spectrum according to the most recent election data. Using Poisson regression, national and sub-national models depicting the incidence of discretionary law enforcement given constituency partisanship are rended. This offers comparative insight into how law enforcement polices when partisanship is assumed on both a county, länder, and national level.

Author

• Katelyn Nutley, University of Cologne