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From Campaigns to Policy: Politicians, Law Enforcement, and Citizen Insecurity in Latin America

Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation examines the politics of public security, particularly as it relates to electoral politics and policy implementation in Latin America. Focusing on Brazil, it leverages a mixed-methods approach, bringing to bear original text data, seven months of fieldwork and 100 expert interviews, and fine-grained administrative and electoral data. It begins by considering how the political science discipline has characterized and analyzed public security policy, often relying on a binary concept. This concept is well anchored by tough-on-crime approaches on one end, which is contrasted by a vague menu of “not tough-on-crime” policies on the other. Further, this binary is assumed to be tied to political ideology, with conservatives forwarding tough-on-crime policies and progressives forwarding opposing strategies. I argue this dichotomy is an oversimplication. I show that a unidimensional spectrum does not capture this issue area well. I instead identify four, non-mutually exclusive policy areas: crime repression, crime prevention, pro-police reform (e.g., wage increases, favorable promotion structure), and human rights and accountability reform. Furthermore, I show that politician ideology does not well explain related policypositions across the majority of these issue areas. This new proposed typology offers a clearer method by which to analyze public security, allowing us to better explore what explains related proposals and policies. With this in hand, the dissertation proceeds by identifying law enforcement officials as a key political group increasingly formally involved in politics in Brazil. I demonstrate how these officials not only influence the campaign priorities of gubernatorial officials – primarily by pushing them to campaign more on pro-police reform (e.g., wage increases) at the expense of human rights and accountabilty reform. It then examines how law enforcement officials influence policy implementation. I demonstrate that governors who are strongly linked to law enforcement officials pursue more repressive strategies when in office, but in an uneven manner depending on the constellation of represented interests at the municipal level. Overall, these findings provide not only conceptual clarity to the topic of public security in political science research but also shed light on the political role of law enforcement officials beyond their influence as street-level operatives and bureaucrats.
DOI: 10.17615/k56s-bd54
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7161948654
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