Law Enforcement with a Democratic Government

The political economy of enforcer liability for wrongful police stops

“…Whereas that literature usually focuses on the policies implemented by a benevolent social planner, we analyze the impact of policies on the voting equilibrium. Thus, our paper is closely related to Mungan (2017) and Langlais and Obidzinski (2017). These papers consider the political economy of imprisonment sentences, and both the detection probability and the fine, respectively.…”

“…In addition to being more realistic, stochastic criminal benefits are particularly useful in analyzing voting behavior in the criminal context, because they generate smooth preferences over policies. Otherwise, that is, when people have fixed criminal benefits known to them ahead of time, given any policy, people know with certainty whether or not they will be criminals in equilibrium (as in Langlais & Obidzinski, 2017). Thus, people with high enough benefits have a common, most preferred policy, and people with low benefits have another most preferred policy.…”

“…These Stage 4 payoff levels are independent of the criminal tendency as the benefit from crime was already drawn in Stage 3 and the tendency influences only the distribution of benefits. The tax as well as the exposure to the crime risk are assumed to be independent of whether or not the individual at hand commits an offense (as in, e.g., Langlais & Obidzinski, 2017). The threshold signal value assessed by the law enforcement agent can be influenced by enforcer liability.…”

“…Mungan (2017) is particularly interested in the consequences of criminal disenfranchisement on the outcome of the political process, following up on the idea that past crime involvement is correlated with future crime engagement. While Mungan (2017) restricts his analysis to a given kind of crime (i.e., a given level of harm), like we do, Langlais and Obidzinski (2017) explore whether political forces have effects that depend on the specific crime considered, that is, the level of harm induced by the criminal act. They indeed find that there are such asymmetric effects, such that the voting equilibrium induces too little (excessive) deterrence for acts with relatively small (higher) social harm.…”

Presumption of Innocence and Deterrence

“…1 Indeed, as explained by Friedman (1992), "expanding the [standard modelà la Becker] to take account of the incentives of the enforcers makes the problem of optimal punishment more difficult", but it "also provides explanations for features of our legal institutions that seem puzzling under the traditional analysis." However, such analysis are scarce in the literature, with the exception of rentseeking (Garoupa and Klerman, 2002), corruption (Bowles and Garoupa, 1997), or electoral concerns (Langlais and Obidzinski (2017)), and the issue of effort has rarely been addressed (to the recent exception of Dharmapala et al, 2016).…”