Co-ethnic bias and policing in an electoral authoritarian regime: Experimental evidence from Uganda

Abstract

Why do people cooperate with police in multi-ethnic societies? For scholars of comparative politics and international relations, examining the effects of ethnicity on patterns of conflict, cooperation, and state repression remains a foundational endeavor. Studies show individuals who share ethnicity are more likely to cooperate to provide public goods. Yet we do not know whether co-ethnic cooperation extends to the provision of law and order and, if so, why people might cooperate more with co-ethnic police officers. In the context of policing, I theorize co-ethnic bias affects interactions between people and the police because individuals prefer officers who share their ethnicity and fear repression more when encountering non-co-ethnic officers. Using a conjoint experiment in Uganda, I demonstrate that individuals prefer reporting crimes to co-ethnic officers, even after controlling for potential confounders. Broadly, this result is strongest among individuals with no trust in the police, the courts, or the political authorities. These findings have important implications for the politics of policing, conflict, and social order.

Ethnicity and Policing in the Global South: Descriptive Representation and Expectations of Police Bias

“…Our results contradict recent findings from Liberia, where studies have either found that less powerful groups are treated worse by their coethnics (Blair et al, 2022) or have found no effect of shared identity (Karim, 2020). Our findings are instead closest to Curtice (2022), who finds in Uganda that citizens are less willing to report crimes to non-coethnic officers. While his explanation focuses on the police as a repressive arm of a semi-authoritarian state-hence highlighting citizens' fear of repression as a mechanism-our focus is on the fairness and tone of largely non-violent everyday interactions.…”

“…Table 2 shows that these differences are statistically significant at conventional levels. Importantly, respondents feel that coethnic police officers will treat them preferentially: coethnicity matters for citizen interactions with police not only out of fear of non-coethnics (as in Curtice, 2022) but also out of the expectation of positive, preferential treatment from coethnics. Analyses Note.…”

“…This work provides an additional data point in the nascent but growing study of policing in the Global South. Prior empirical evidence from other contexts suggests that shared ethnicity with a police officer can have negative effects (Blair et al, 2022), positive effects (Curtice, 2022), or no effects (Karim, 2020) on interactions. This study shows that for mundane interactions in weakly institutionalized contexts, the answer may lie somewhere in the middle.…”

Citizen Cooperation with the Police: Evidence from Contemporary Guatemala

“…The social relationship between the police and the community also bears on citizen perceptions of whether police share their interests. Some research on policing posits that ethnicity can play a major role in shaping citizen trust and cooperation with the police (Curtice, 2019; Nanes, 2018), and a large body of work on the U.S. shows that minority groups are often targeted by police (Lundman & Kaufman, 2003). These groups also have less trust in police and therefore cooperate less (Tyler, 2005).…”

Evidence of Caste-Class Discrimination from a Conjoint Analysis of Law Enforcement Officers

“… 3 Although conjoints have been used to examine public perceptions on policing (e.g., Curtice 2022), the method, to the best of our knowledge, has not been used with police officer samples. …”