Does Recruitment Shape Police Politics?

• In Event: Bureaucratic Recruitment and Incentives

Abstract

After describing a newly assembled dataset linking the political behavior and career trajectories of thousands of police applicants, we test competing accounts of police politics. Civil service laws in New York state require police departments to consider applicants in order of their rank on promotion exams. Leveraging idiosyncratic rules determining the rankings between similarly scoring applicants, we trace the impact of hiring and promotion on individual police officer's decisions to vote or donate to political causes. Our findings are the first to document the causal effects of self-selection, selective recruitment and professional socialization on police officer behavior.

Authors

• Sidak Yntiso, University of Rochester

• Hannah Simpson, Texas A&M University