Fighting Crime with a Little Help from my Friends: Party Affiliation, Inter‐jurisdictional Cooperation and Crime in Mexico
Abstract
We investigate the relationship between inter-jurisdictional cooperation and law
enforcement in Mexico. Exploiting a Regression Discontinuity Design in close
municipal elections, we study how improved opportunities for cooperation in
crime prevention among neighboring municipalities - proxied by their degree
of political alignment - may result in lower rates of violent crime. We find
that municipalities in which the party in power in the majority of neighboring
jurisdictions barely won experience significantly lower homicide rates during
the mayor’s mandate than those in which it barely lost. This effect is sizeable
and independent of which party is in power in the neighboring municipalities.
Domains
Economics and FinanceOrigin | Publisher files allowed on an open archive |
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