Emilio Depetris-Chauvin (PUC-Chile)

Party Politics, Inter-jurisdictional Cooperation and Law Enforcement: Evidence from Mexico

Abstract: We study how partisan politics affect inter-jurisdictional cooperation and the quality of public good provision in federal systems. We look at law enforcement in Mexico, a country characterized by high levels of violent crime and strong partisan cleavages. Exploiting a Regression Discontinuity Design in close municipal elections, we find that municipalities in which the party in power in the majority of neighboring municipalities barely wins are more likely to cooperate with their neighbors in the area of law enforcement than those in which it barely lost. The effect is stronger in periods of widespread violence when the returns to cooperation are higher. Improved cooperation due to party-alignment, in turn, leads to more effective crime prevention and a significant decline in homicide rates. This effect is sizable and robust, and it increases as the share of neighboring municipalities governed by the same party increases. Moreover, it is independent of which party governs the neighboring municipalities, which party was the incumbent, or which party won the election, and it does not appear to be driven by improved cooperation with either federal or state authorities. Taken together, our findings indicate that, in the presence of geographical spillovers, favoring horizontal cooperation may be an effective way of improving the provision of local public goods, but that partisan divisions can interfere with this process.

Joint work with Ruben Durante and Emilio Gutierrez