Seminar series The influence of police unions in local elections Evidence from U.S. cities spending and performance Add to calendar 2025-05-29 17:00 2025-05-29 18:30 Europe/Rome The influence of police unions in local elections Sala del Capitolo Badia Fiesolana YYYY-MM-DD Print Share: Share on Facebook Share on BlueSky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email Scheduled dates May 29 2025 17:00 - 18:30 CEST Sala del Capitolo, Badia Fiesolana Organised by Department of Political and Social Sciences In the context of the Comparative Politics Seminar Series, this session features a presentation by Maria Carreri (University of California). Despite a surge in attention to local policies governing public safety issues and despite mounting news reports highlighting large sums donated by police unions to local candidates, scholars have largely ignored the role that unions of police officers play in local politics and policy. More generally, evidence on campaign financing in U.S. local elections is very scant. In this project, we have put together the first large-scale dataset on campaign finance in mayoral elections, covering 1073 cities and 2303 elections between 2000 and 2019, which allows us to examine the extent, determinants, and effects of police unions’ donations in local elections. First, we establish a set of new descriptive facts on the involvement of police unions in funding local elections. Second, leveraging within-city variation in police unions’ donations over time, we show that in cities with a mayor backed by police unions, police departments increase in size, but police performance weakly worsens. Related events