The Impact of Police Killings on Proximal Voter Turnout

• Author: G. Agustin Markarian
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221139142
• Published date: 01 May 2023
• Date: 01 May 2023

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(3) 414–430

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221139142

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The Impact of Police Killings on Proximal

Voter Turnout

G. Agustin Markarian

1



Abstract

This paper studies how spatial proximity to pre-election police killings affects voter turnout. I argue that incidents of police

violence have neighborhood-level effects. Nearby voters are more likely to learn about proximal killings than those further

away. If perceived as unjust, police killings teach political lessons that reduce voters’trust in government and poli tical efficacy. In

turn, this impacts voter turnout. Observing the 2016 presidential election, I test this theory using geolocated voter data and a

difference-in-differences design with matched groups. I find that pre-election police killings reduce vot er turnout by 3 per-

centage points in the killings’one-mile radius. Space and race matter. Police killings reduce Black voter turnout by 5.9 percentage

points in the killings’one-mile radius, but Black voters one to two miles away from the killings are unaffected. However, police

killings do not affect White and Latino voter turnout regardless of the distance.

Keywords

race and ethnicity, policing, voter turnout, contextual effects

Many civil rights activists believed that the police killing of

Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, and the sub-

sequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, would propel a new

civil rights movement targeted against a discriminatory and

punitive criminal justice system (Martino-Taylor et al., 2016).

In some ways, it did; the police killing of Michael Brown

changed local politics in Ferguson, Missouri. Voter turnout

increased in the subsequent local election, and the city

council became more representative of the city’s demo-

graphics. After the killing of Michael Brown, police killings

of unarmed Black and brown men continued to fuel local

protests, and some local policy victories like police-worn

body cameras were achieved (Williamson et al., 2018;Levitz,

2016). However, the political consequences of police vio-

lence remain poorly understood (Soss & Weaver, 2017).

This paper argues that living near a pre-election police

killing reduces people’s likelihood of voting. Most police

killings are hyperlocal events; they receive little media

coverage, and local residents are more likely to know about

and be psychologically impacted by nearby killings (Bor

et al., 2018;Ang, 2020;Branton et al., 2021). Seemingly

unjust and aggressive policing practices, like police violence,

may mobilize or demobilize depending on the context

(Weaver & Lerman, 2010;Walker, 2014;White, 2019A).

However, research studying the neighborhood and contextual

effects of policing generally suggest that aggressive and

violent policing demobilizes entire communities (Burch,

2013;Kang & Dawes, 2017;Branton et al., 2021; for

exceptional cases, see Laniyonu, 2019). Specifically, prox-

imity to police violence is linked to lower trust in government

and diminished external political efficacy (Silva et al., 2020;

Branton et al., 2021). In turn, less trust in government and

external efficacy represses turnout (Hooghe, 2017;Finkel,

1985). I further argue that police killings will be particularly

demobilizing for Black voters because local police killings

dampen Black Americans’political efficacy more than other

racial groups’(Branton et al., 2021).

This paper leverages state voter files and comprehensive

data from Mapping Police Violence to study how police

killings affect voter participation rates. Of particular interest

are the spatial relationship between police killings and voters

and the contextual circumstances that may mediate voters’

reactions to the killings, such as voters’race and ethnicity and

the victim’s armed status. This paper tests whether voters

living in places with a history of protests against police vi-

olence behave differently than those living in places without a

history of protests against police violence. Police killings

sometimes lead to local protests against police violence and

these protests are linked to increased voter mobilization,

1

Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

G. Agustin Markarian, Loyola University Chicago,1000 W Sheridan Rd,

Coffey Hall 338, Chicago, IL 60660 USA.

Email: gmarkarian@luc.edu

potentially reversing police killings’demobilizing effects

(Williamson et al., 2018;Enos et al., 2019).

Synthesizing research designs employed by Burch (2013),

White (2019A), and Ang (2020), this paper studies how pre-

election police killings in California, Florida, and Ohio af-

fected the participation rates of spatially proximal voters in

the 2016 general election. It does so by comparing the

participation rates of active registered voters living within a

mile of a police killing occurring before the 2016 general

election to the participation rates of active registered voters

living within a mile of a police killing occurring after the 2016

general election using a difference-in-differences (DiD) de-

sign. This research design controls for time-invariant and

national time-variant confounds, jointly leveraging the high

causal inference of a quasi-experiment and a DiD, while

providing individual-level data within spatially defined

neighborhoods.

Ifind that voters living within a mile of a pre-election

police killings were 3 percentage points less likely to vote

than those in the control group. Police killings were partic-

ularly demobilizing when voters lived in closer proximity to a

killing, but generally had no effect on voters living more than

a mile away from the events. The effect of spatial distance

between one’s home and a killing appears to be continuous

and robust. Furthermore, the findings suggest that race

matters. Police killings particularly demobilize Black voters,

and police killings of Black victims are more demobilizing

than police killings of White and Latino victims. Victims’

armed status does not appear to matter, and voters in cities

with more Black Lives Matter protests prior to the killings

were equally impacted.

This paper contributes to the literature on policing and

contextual factors shaping voting behavior by studying the

effects of proximal police violence on voter turnout, a

plausible but untested source of variation in voter partici-

pation rates. While the effects found in this study are small on

aggregate because police killings are relatively rare and the

effects are localized, the findings help inform our under-

standing of the impact of police violence on voter behavior.

Lethal police violence demobilized communities and in-

creased racial inequities in the 2016 presidential election.

While police killings are relatively rare, other forms of police

violence are far more common. This research may help us

think about the consequences of non-lethal violence. Fur-

thermore, while this study focuses on spatial proximity as a

source of exposure, other forms of exposure may produce

similar effects on populations at further distances.

Contextual Effects and Local

Focusing Events

Political scientists are increasingly attuned to the fact that

salient and spatially proximal events cause changes in mass

political behavior (Cho & Gimpel, 2012;Velez & Martin,

2013;Bishop, 2014;Enos, 2016). Spatial proximity to violent

events appears to be politically transformative. For example,

Newman and Hartman (2019) find that spatial proximity to

mass shootings increases support for restrictive gun control

policies, while Garcia-Montoya, Arjona, and Lacomb (2022)

find that school shootings increase local support for Dem-

ocratic candidates but do not impact voter turnout.

1

Persistent violence is associated with lower levels of

political participation. While early research on criminal vi-

olence suggests that personal victimization is associated with

a higher propensity to vote (Bateson, 2012), scholars have

recently linked neighborhood criminal violence to voter

disenfranchisement (Trelles & Carreras, 2012). Using lon-

gitudinal data from Mexico, Trelles and Carreras (2012) find

that an increase in the local homicide rate is associated with a

decrease in voter participation rates. They argue that voters

who experience greater levels of criminal violence in their

proximity have lower satisfaction with local political insti-

tutions and democratic practices (Fernandez & Kuenzi, 2010;

Carreras, 2013), which in turn leads to lower levels of

electoral participation. Similarly, various scholars find that

fear of political violence in developing countries demobilizes

voters (Bratton, 2008). In general, research on the effects of

local violent events suggests that they have important spatial

components, though the effects appear to be localized to

smaller geographic units.

Police violence may have different repercussions on po-

litical behavior than criminal violence, however. Yet, a broad

array of scholarship suggests that residential proximity to

police violence causes various detrimental psychological

effects. Scholars find that proximal police shootings affect

mental health, school performance, and crime reporting (Bor

et al., 2018;Ang, 2020;Desmond et al., 2016). Far from

causing small behavior changes, their substantive effects

have important implications for many outcomes we care

about as social scientists. For example, Ang (2020) finds that

students living within half a mile of a police shooting during

9th grade were 3.5 percent less likely to graduate from high

school and 2.5 percent less likely to attend college. Related

scholarship also finds that police violence and perceived

injustice aggravate attitudes towards law enforcement.

Desmond, Papachristos, and Kirk (2016) find that following

the police beating of Frank Jude, an African American male

in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, city residents, particularly Black

residents, were less likely to report crimes relative to the pre-

treatment control group.

2

Police and Anti-Democratic Political Socialization

Research on police violence further suggests that negative

interactions with law enforcement, particularly those per-

ceived as violent or unjust reduce trust in policing (Weitzer &

Tuch, 2005;Nadal et al., 2017;Brunson & Miller, 2005;

Mullinix et al., 2020). For example, Weitzer and Tuch (2005)

find that “personal and vicarious experiences with police

misconduct”were correlated with negative perceptions of law

Markarian 415