Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This study examines whether electoral incentive of elected superior of bureaucrats can influence bureaucratic decision within their agencies. Although there is a vast literature on whether and how electoral incentives influence public spending or elected officials’ their own behavior, we know little about how these same incentives influence bureaucratic behavior. Do electoral incentives of elected officials also trickle down to what bureaucrats do? To answer these questions, this paper examines county sheriffs and arrest decisions of their officers in New York State. More concretely, this study aims at answering three research questions: (1) whether the number of arrests increases prior to the reelection of incumbent sheriffs, (2) whether the number of arrests subsequently decreases in post reelection years, (3) and whether changes in the number of arrests are more prominent with competitive reelections.

A panel design assesses whether the number of arrests per quarter among 55 county sheriff departments in New York State from 2000 to 2013 changed around election cycles. This takes advantage of different election cycles across the state. Data on sheriff elections are collected from general election results, managed by Board of Elections website of each county. Data on arrests are collected from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data, maintained by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

Preliminary result of OLS with fixed effects model shows that the average numbers of quarterly arrests both in the reelection year and in post reelection year are not significantly different with that of non-reelection period. Moreover, there is no evidence that the effect of this electoral cycle on average number of arrests is intensified for the subset of elections when there is at least one challenger against incumbent sheriff and when the race between challenger and incumbent is close contest. This study can be a starting point for expanding our knowledge on how electoral incentive of the head of government agencies affects bureaucratic decision and policy outcomes at the county and local governments.