Elections as Focusing Events: Explaining Attitudes Toward the Police and the Government in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Traditional views hold that citizens' attitudes toward the police are driven by local concerns. We contend that public attitudes toward the police are responsive to systematic and periodic national-level political factors. In particular, we show that national elections as a focusing event alter periodically the determinants of attitudes toward the police. Using a logistic regression model and diachronic data from Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States, we find that attitudes toward the police and the national government are linked, and this linkage is responsive to the influence of national election campaigns in varying degrees. In addition, we find that attitudes toward the Mexican police are sensitive to partisan changes in the composition of the national political government. We find no such sensitivity in the police attitudes of Costa Rican and U.S. citizens. This suggests that police attitudes are not only affected by the performance of the national political government but also by the character (consolidated versus unconsolidated) of the national political government. In short, police attitudes in new democracies are an indication of the unconsolidated nature of the state apparatus.Cl assic studies of public attitudes toward the police point to local factors as the predominant determinants in police attitudes (Whyte 1943;Wilson 1963). However, more recent studies indicate that attitudes toward national governmental structures also influence attitudes toward the police (Albrecht & Green 1977;Cao & Zhao 1998, 2005. Extending this research, we find that perceptions of the police are related to evaluations of the national government in three different countries. We also find that this relationship is stronger during national election years, when issues of crime and punishment are more likely to be on the national

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“…As we are interested in medium and large n analyses that are guided by the MSF, we exclude those articles that do not refer to the MSF or to at least one of its core concepts in the empirical analysis . Next, we eliminate those articles that, first, are only inspired by the MSF but do not apply it (Taylor, Ford, & Reinschmidt, ; Walker & Waterman, ); second, do not operationalize at least one MSF concept (Adams, Croudace, & Tiesdell, ); third, are simulations (Rapaport, Levi‐Faur, & Miodownik, ; Taylor et al, ); and, fourth, do not test the framework as such but one of its core assumptions (Robinson & Eller, ). Consequently, of the 311 MSF applications only four are based on a medium to high number of cases and are actually guided—although to a different extent—by the MSF: Anderson, Box‐Steffensmeier, and Sinclair‐Chapman (), Eshbaugh‐Soha (), Travis and Zahariadis (), and Liu, Lindquist, and Vedlitz ().…”

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