Dissertation Project:
"Police Reform as an Instrument of Criminal Protection"
My dissertation explores 1) the conditions under which politicians are more likely to adopt police reforms at the local level and 2) the effectiveness of these reforms in containing organized criminal violence in drug wars.
While police reform is often viewed as a tool for reducing crime and corruption, I argue that, in contexts where rent-seeking is pervasive, politicians are likely to pursue centralizing police reforms as a means of facilitating criminal protection rackets. Prior research shows that politicians often protect OCGs under the condition that violence remains low, enabling more stable and profitable arrangements among them. I extend this logic by explaining the conditions under which local politicians implement reforms that can potentially be exploited to shield, rather than suppress, organized crime. I contend that centralizing reforms are unlikely to be implemented in localities where multiple organized OCGs compete violently, since inter-organizational conflict undermines the stability of protection agreements. Politicians are instead more likely to collude with organized OCGs in low-violence settings because the risk of disruption is lower and the returns from illicit collaboration more predictable.
I test my theory within Mexico by leveraging subnational variation in the implementation of mando único, a reform that centralizes municipal police forces under gubernatorial control. This reform ostensibly aims to address the coordination issues posed by fragmented police institutions---those lacking integration under a single command structure that spans jurisdictions. Through Spanish-language interviews conducted with local, state, and federal officials as well as civil society activists and journalists across eight Mexican states, I collected qualitative insights that allowed me to corroborate the mechanisms underpinning the onset and persistence of centralizing reforms. Additionally, through a close election design, I find that reform is more likely to be implemented in municipalities that are politically aligned with gubernatorial parties when criminal violence is minimal. Moreover, through a time-series cross-sectional analysis, I find that the reform is more likely to be reversed as politicians reach the end of their terms and criminal violence increases. These results suggest that policies which centralize control over police forces can be co-opted by corrupt officials to protect rather than repress OCGs.
This ongoing project has received financial support from the John L. Simpson ABD Research Fellowship in Area Studies, the University of California Alianza MX, Tinker Field Research Grant, and the Center for the Study of American Democracy Research Grant.
Working Papers:
"The Logic of Political Entry During Violent Electoral Cycles." With Navin Bapat.
Abstract: Elections tend to be violent events in many democratic settings, but in Latin America they lead to the systematic targeting of politicians by organized crime groups. It is thus unclear why individuals decide to run as mayoral candidates at the local level during violent elections. To answer this, we develop a formal model that explains why individuals decide to enter politics within the context of drug wars. We find that a candidate's decision to run while facing the risk of assassination is a function of both their political ideology and the probability that they are killed inadvertently in drug violence. Candidates seeking more radical changes are more likely to run even under the threat of violence. However, we also maintain that the range of candidates willing to run increases as indiscriminate drug violence worsens since not running may also impose a political cost. Our model sheds light on some of the mechanisms through which criminal organizations can undermine democracy at the local level in the Global South.
"Patronage Protection: Violence and Migration in Depression-Era Texas." With Leonardo Arriola & Juvenal Cortes Rivera.
Abstract: There remains considerable debate concerning the extent to which Mexicans were coerced into leaving the United States through repatriation campaigns that emerged during the Great Depression. While prior research has emphasized factors such as economic crisis or xenophobic sentiment, we argue that local patronage politics conditioned the migration choices of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in distinct ways. We claim that White political bosses had an incentive to distinguish Mexican Americans from Mexican immigrants because only the former could trade votes for political protection. To assess this hypothesis, we examine net migration across Texas counties between 1930 and 1940. We show that Mexican Americans were less likely to leave counties controlled by patronage machines, as proxied by the effective number of candidates. Mexican immigrants, by contrast, were more likely to depart counties with identity-related factors, such as a history of anti-Mexican mob violence and slave-owning, uncorrelated with Mexican American migration.
* Drafts of these papers are available upon request.
Work in Progress:
"State Repression and Criminal Portfolio Diversification."
Abstract: How does state repression affect the illicit strategies and behaviors of OCGs? This paper argues that, when faced with pressures stemming from the state, COs have the incentive to diversify their revenue streams to reduce the costs of operating in the illicit economy. However, different types of repression have different effects on criminal profile diversification (CPD), which I measure through a variant of the Herfindahl–Hirschman index. Through a mixed methods design that combines statistical models with case study research, I find that criminal profiles become more diverse in Mexican municipalities where state-level police forces crack down on criminal groups but become less diverse in municipalities where federal and municipal police forces intervene. Compared to state-level policing institutions---which are becoming increasingly militarized---federal governments are too detached from local affairs, and municipal police forces are too weak, for their interventions to have a positive effect on the tactics and behaviors of COs. However, state-level policing institutions have just enough coercive capacity and knowledge of local institutions, both formal and informal, to be able to shape criminal behavior. The results indicate that state-level security policies tend to backfire more than federal- and municipal-level interventions.
"Gender Security Policies in the Shadow of Criminal Wars." With Angie Torres-Beltran
Abstract: Gender security policies are often seen as a remedy for reducing violence against women (VAW). However, my co-author (A. Torres-Beltran) and I have work in progress in which we argue that such policies are unlikely to be effective without sustained coordination be- tween the different levels of government in federal democracies. We test this argument through the implementation of Alerta de Violencia de Género contra las Mujeres (AVGM) in Mexico: a policy that provides federal funds to support subnational governments’ efforts to address VAW. Leveraging large-scale, municipal-level administrative data between 2015- 2021, our preliminary results demonstrate that municipalities with the AVGM are associated with higher rates of reported and actual VAW. However, in municipalities that are politically aligned with state governments, the AVGM significantly decreases reporting yet increases actual VAW. Our results imply that political alignment, through co-partisan governors and mayors, potentially limits the aim of gender policies. Our study contributes to a growing body of research that emphasizes how local partisan dynamics impact security provision in violent contexts.