There's (rarely) a new sheriff in town: The incumbency advantage for local law enforcement

Abstract

Democratic accountability requires voters to select high-quality politicians or sanction incumbents. To what extent does local electoral politics meet this standard? I explore the electoral context of the county sheriff, typically tasked with corrections and policing. Using an original dataset of 5500 sheriff elections, I produce the first estimates of electoral competitiveness and incumbency advantage for sheriffs, including variation in the incumbency advantage by partisan election, timing, and agency size. The sheriff incumbency advantage estimated with a regression discontinuity design is about a 45 percentage point boost in the probability of winning the next election – far exceeding the advantages of other local offices. One consequence is a “delayed partisan realignment” with mismatch between national and county-level voting. Moreover, I show that sheriffs hold office for more than twice as long as appointed police chiefs, compared to whom sheriffs enjoy independence from elected officials without facing significant scrutiny by voters.