The forthcoming article “Polarization in police union politics” by Jennifer Gaudette is summarized by the author below.
Police unions are a vital yet understudied interest group. They are one of the most politically active local interest groups, and endorsements are the political activity in which police unions engage most frequently. In my forthcoming AJPS article, “Polarization in Police Union Politics,” I use an original data set of police union endorsements and a conjoint survey experiment to show that police union endorsements generate ideologically polarized responses from voters.
Local politics scholars debate how important ideology is at the local level. I theorize that the effects of police union endorsements have changed in recent years due to growing national discussion of police violence against racial minorities and subsequent polarization in response. Using two studies, I find significant ideological polarization at the local level surrounding police union endorsements.
Conjoint survey experiment results show liberal respondents are significantly less likely to vote for a police union-endorsed candidate, while conservative respondents are significantly more likely to vote for them. Surprisingly, though national polling typically shows racial gaps in confidence in the police, racial and ethnic identity are not predictive of response to police union endorsements, suggesting that respondents’ ideological alignment has greater effects on how individuals react to police politics.
Observational results also show significant polarization. Using real police union endorsements in cities of at least 180,000 across 269 mayoral elections between 2011-2022, I show that the effects of police union endorsements have changed over time in tandem with national polarization over policing. Police union-endorsed incumbents received roughly six percentage points higher vote share in the 2011-2015 period, and there are no differences between liberal and conservative cities. However, police-endorsed incumbents receive significantly lower vote share in liberal cities in the 2016-2022 period. The 2016 shift is notable because it was during that presidential election that the two national parties took clear, opposing stances, and national surveys found increasing polarization between liberals and conservatives beginning in that year.
Using the experimental results, I am also able to show that other local interest groups that represent polarized issues can generate polarized responses. In my experiment, liberal respondents are significantly more likely to vote for a teachers’ union-endorsed candidate, while conservative respondents are significantly less likely to do so. However, candidates endorsed by chambers of commerce or firefighters’ unions – neither of which represent polarized issues at the national level – do not generate polarized responses from respondents. These results show that ideology and national polarization can have significant effects on vote choice in municipal elections, providing evidence that both are relevant at the local level.
About the Author: Jennifer Gaudette is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego and an incoming Assistant Professor at UC Riverside’s School of Public Policy (Fall 2025). Their research “Polarization in police union politics” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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