Dissertation Project:
Police Reform as an Instrument of Criminal Protection: Subnational Evidence from Mexico
My dissertation explores 1) the conditions under which local politicians are more likely to adopt police reforms that repress or protect criminal organizations and 2) the effectiveness of these reforms in containing organized criminal violence and police corruption in drug wars.
I argue that politicians exploit conditions of political alignment to implement police reforms that shape local criminal dynamics. Central governments pressure local governments to adopt police centralization reforms to either facilitate state repression or enable corrupt politicians to forge collusive relations with criminal organizations (COs). Further, whether governments coordinate to adopt one of the two approaches depends on the political party in question. While some parties have a strong ideological inclination for employing repressive policing tactics against COs, others have historically formed state-sponsored protection rackets or participated in pact-making or breaking to quell contested gang territories. Given that states are willing to protect COs under the condition that criminal violence is kept to a minimum, police reform is less likely to be implemented in localities where multiple COs operate and engage in excessive violent conflict. This is because high levels of criminal violence make it difficult for politicians and COs to extract rents from a protectionist arrangement. Additionally, once implemented, both tactics can shape levels of violence in opposite directions. Whereas the repression strategy produces more violence because it makes local illicit economies more competitive, the protection tactic reduces violence since it helps the state mediate relations between violent criminal networks. My dissertation demonstrates that parties that established systems of protection during times of autocracy use policing institutions to shape collusive state-crime relations after democratic transitions.
I test this theory within Mexico by leveraging subnational variation in the implementation of a police reform known as mando único between 2010-2022. Under this reform, municipal police forces are centralized under the control of governors. My analysis employs a mixed methodology that combines natural experiments, case study research, and in-depth interviews with state and nonstate actors. Specifically, I employ a series of close election designs to test the effects of alignment on police reform and complement them with model-based statistical approaches to test additional observable implications of my theory. Through case studies, I then trace the process through which the main explanatory factors influenced the adoption of protective and repressive police reforms in the states of Michoacan and Guanajuato respectively.
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:
"State Repression and Criminal Portfolio Diversification."
Abstract: How does state repression affect the illicit strategies and behaviors of criminal organizations (COs)? 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.
"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.