Seminar series The Political Consequences of Police Slowdowns Add to calendar 2026-03-26 17:00 2026-03-26 18:30 Europe/Rome The Political Consequences of Police Slowdowns Seminar Room 3 Badia Fiesolana YYYY-MM-DD Print Share: Share on Facebook Share on BlueSky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email Scheduled dates Mar 26 2026 17:00 - 18:30 CET Seminar Room 3, Badia Fiesolana Organised by Department of Political and Social Sciences This session of the Comparative Politics Seminar Series feature a presentation by Elisa Wirsching Assistant Professor for Political Science and Public Policy in the Government Department (London School of Economics) Police resistance has become an important phenomenon in American cities, where officers and their unions strategically threaten opposition and reduce service quality to shape political outcomes. Yet systematic evidence on whether resistance effectively influences political behavior and electoral accountability remains scarce. Using a vignette survey experiment, we examine how voters respond to signals of police-politician misalignment and service quality outcomes following hypothetical reforms. We find that poor service quality significantly reduces support for both reforms and incumbents. Additionally, police-politician misalignment imposes independent electoral costs on politicians regardless of actual service outcomes. We complement these findings with a unique survey of 500 US local elected officials. A plurality of officials expect constituents to hold them primarily responsible for declines in proactive policing, and 18% report having experienced resistance through shirking. Experimentally induced threats of resistance significantly reduce officials' own support for reform. Together, these findings reveal a dual mechanism of bureaucratic leverage: credible threats generate anticipatory political costs before implementation, while actual service deterioration damages incumbents electorally afterward. Register Related events