How does a candidate's professional affiliation with the "security sector" (police and military) affect voter perceptions of that candidate? This project explores the results of an online image-based conjoint experiment fielded to Brazilian voters. Results suggest that voters find police candidates to be more capable on questions of security, corruption, and rule of law. Contrary to expectations, respondents did not find security sector candidates to be less committed to democratic principles than others.

Pre-Analysis Plan

Experiment Example

Leveraging spatial data from the City of South Bend Open Data Portal and an original online survey targeting South Bend residents, we explore three types of police/citizen contact: Quotidian Contact, Coercive Contact, and Contact through Service Provision. We find that the impact of police contact on citizen attitudes varies depending on the type of contact. Indirect exposure to coercive contact, for instance, leads to lower levels of trust while greater Quotidian Contact, seeing officers more frequently in non-coercive situations, correlates with higher levels of trust. On the whole, our study demonstrates the fragility and challenge of building trust in police-citizen relationship, and provides some guidance on how US police departments should try to improve their community relations.

(With Maggie Shum, PhD)

When do governments at one level of a federal system choose to enter a policy domain traditionally or legally reserved for a different level? While entering a new policy domain expands the power of local leaders, it is a risky gambit that opens the possibility of costly struggles with regional and national institutions. This project conducts a semi-automated textual analysis of over 60,000 Brazilian mayoral electoral platforms from three electoral cycles to uncover what kinds of policy proposals mayors make in their campaigns as well as their content with a special focus on public security, an area where mayors have been increasingly campaigning but have constitutionally very limited policy making powers.