Replication Data for: Political Diversity in U.S. Police Agencies

Partisans are increasingly divided on policing policy, which may affect officer behavior. We merge rosters from 99 of the 100 largest local U.S. agencies—over one third of local law enforcement agents nationwide—with voter files to study police partisanship. Police skew more Republican than their jurisdictions, with notable exceptions. Using fine-grained data in Chicago and Houston, we compare behavior by Democratic and Republican officers facing common circumstances. Overall, we find few partisan differences after correcting for multiple comparisons. But consistent with prior work, we find Black officers make fewer stops and arrests in Chicago, and they use force less in both cities. Comparing same-race Democratic and Republican officers, we find only that White Democrats make more violent-crime arrests than White Republicans in Chicago. Our results suggest that despite Republicans’ preference for more punitive law enforcement policy and their overrepresentation in policing, partisan divisions do not translate into detectable differences in on-the-ground enforcement.