Danny Naftel, "Can Policing Increase Participation? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment"
Existing scholarship documents the ways in which involuntary contact with police can harm and demobilize the public, but policing can also provide important benefits in the form of reassurance and crime control. Because of this, the aggregate consequences of high levels of policing are unclear. To test the effects of policing on turnout, I leverage a unique field experiment in which the presence of the police and the tactics they used were randomized. Some neighborhoods experienced high-intensity patrols that generated large numbers of stops and arrests; others experienced patrols that emphasized non-enforcement, community-oriented tactics; while others experienced no changes in policing. I find that both interventions increased turnout in subsequent elections by roughly 3 percentage points despite large differences in officer behavior. These findings offer the strongest evidence to date that increasing the presence of the police in neighborhoods with high crime rates can generate positive feedback effects that encourage voting.
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel room K354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20251028T160000Z DTEND:20251028T180000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR