The People’s Captain: Understanding Police Officers as an Electoral Brand

• Published date: 01 September 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241253204
• Author: Jacob R. Turner
• Date: 01 September 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(3) 992–1009

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129241253204

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The People’s Captain: Understanding

Police Off‌icers as an Electoral Brand

Jacob R. Turner

Abstract

In Brazil, police off‌icers have increasingly competed in elections, mirroring expanded roles in government for coerc ive

agents in cases such as the United States, the Philippines, and Mexico. In this paper, I develop a theory of how voters

perceive these candidates. The symbol of the police off‌icer represents the abstract idea of orde r and stability, more than

just a crime f‌ighter. Corruption scandals and insecurity in Brazil and Latin America have given rise to “order”in response

to the chaos of politics as usual as a compelling electoral brand. I therefore expect that voters associate police off‌icer

candidates with strong, decisive leadership, social conservatism, a strong commitment to the rule of law, honesty in

government, and a weak commitment to democracy. An image-based conjoint experim ent f‌ielded to a representative

sample of Brazilian voters (N= 3,098) f‌inds support for the theoretical framework, but respondents didnot perceive the

police off‌icer candidate as less democratic than other professional prof‌iles. The results help to inform our understanding

of electoral politics in post-transition democratic regimes, demonstrating how armed agents of the state might remain

popular and inf‌luential within the context of a consolidated democracy.

Keywords

Latin American politics, elections and voting behavior, police, conjoint experiment

Introduction

In 2018, Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro, a long-serving

Federal Deputy from Rio de Janeiro but a then relatively

unknown politician. He ran on a platform of anti-

corruption, evangelism, and aggressive anti-crime rhet-

oric including a notorious phrase that came to def‌ine his

campaign, bandito bom ´

e bandito morto (the only good

criminal is a dead criminal). One important feature of

Bolsonaro’s candidacy and his subsequent government

has been his connection with the security forces. Not only

is Bolsonarohimself a former captain in the Brazilianarmy,

but both of the vice presidential candidates he ran with,

Hamilton Mourãoin 2018 and Walter Braga Netto in 2022,

were generals, and pro-Bolsonaro factions in congress are

populated with former military off‌icers. Campaigning for

reelection, Bolsonaro’soff‌icial campaign jingle was even

titled CapitãodoPovo(The People’sCaptain)tofurther

emphasize this military connection.

However, Bolsonaro also projected a strong alliance

with a different security sector corporation - the police. As

Bolsonaro’s opponent Luiz In´

acio da Silva (Lula) put it:

Bolsonaro “doesn’t like the people, he likes the police”

(Azevedo 2022). While the military and police are both

agents of the state charged with wielding the state’s

monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion (Bittner

1970), the police’s mission of maintaining public order

within the state contrasts with the military’s outwardly-

facing mission, meaning that these groups occupy similar,

but not identical, spaces in the public’s imagination.

Arguably, Bolsonaro’salliance wi th the police was just

as pivotal during the campaign and transition than his

relationship with the military, as high-prof‌ile incidents

such as highway patrolmen in the Northeastern state of

Pernambuco temporarily blocking Workers’Party (PT)

voters from the polls (Camargo and Falcão 2022), and the

alleged complicity of some Bras´

ılia police in the January

8th riot (Teixeira and Alcˆ

antara 2023) dominated media

coverage for a time. Police off‌icers also ran for political

off‌ice in the 2022 elections in record numbers (Zanini

2022). This growth in the number of police off‌icers

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jacob R. Turner, University of Notre Dame, 2060 Jenkins Nanovic Halls,

Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA.

Email: Turnerjacobr13@gmail.com

running in elections and the discrete incidents of political

interference present important questions about the proper

role of the security sector in democratic politics and how

voters perceive this phenomenon. The growing partici-

pation of the police in elections at all levels of government

in Brazil (Berlatto, Codato, and Bolognesi 2016;Pagnan

and Rodrigues 2022;Zanini 2022) is striking, especially

in a country like Brazil that has a long and unresolved

history with military government (Atencio 2014), police

violence (Magaloni et al. 2020;Arias and Barnes 2017;

Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança P ´

ublica 2022), and col-

lusion between law enforcement and armed criminal

groups (Flom 2022).

This paper focuses specif‌ically on police candidacies,

developing a theory of the police electoral branding and

testing the expectations empirically through an original

image-based candidate choice experiment. While other

scholars have treated the professional heuristic of police

off‌icer as interchangeable with “tough-on-crime”or mano

dura policies, I argue that crime f‌ighting is actually a

single component of a broader idea: that of order. The

police, the most visible organ of the state, occupy a

complex position in society, and reducing their image

down to simply a signal for punitive public security

policies is missing important components of their electoral

brand. I suggest that other features associated with this

particular understanding of order such as strong leader-

ship skills, credible claims to enforce a rule of law and

f‌ight corruption, and associations with traditional values

and powerful social groups are important qualities that

voters associate with the police.

This paper presents novel evidence from an image-

based conjoint experiment f‌ielded in July 2022 to support

the theory. Respondents were presented with three pairs of

randomly generated pairs of election handbills known in

Brazil as santinhos and then asked to evaluate the can-

didate pairs along several theoretically motivated di-

mensions. Results lend support to the theory, although

interestingly voters did not perceive police candidates as

any more or less democratic than others.

In addition to providing the most complete under-

standing of police off‌icer candidates to date, this paper

presents two innovations. First, voters can and do dif-

ferentiate between “tough-on-crime”policies and the

professional signal of being a police off‌icer. While the

professional signal and policy signal are related, under-

standing the electoral appeal of security sector candidates,

especially police off‌icers, is conceptually distinct from

studying the appeal of punitive public security policies.

Second, voters do not, on average, f‌ind police off‌icer

candidates to be undemocratic. This “null”f‌inding indi-

cates that voters are not rebelling against democracy in the

abstract by supporting these candidates, and f‌ind their

participation in the electoral process to be normal and

possibly even desirable. The presence of politicians in

uniform may not be as large of a threat to democratic

consolidation as traditionally thought, at least in terms of

the intentions of voters.

Security Sector Candidates

The blurring of lines between elected off‌icials and state

security agents is a familiar phenomenon in the Americas

(Jaffe 2013;Trejo and Ley 2018). Frequently, the police in

Brazil are responsible for much violent crime (Bueno

2014;Willis 2015) and are often perceived as ineff‌icient.

However, despite relatively low levels of trust in the

police, police off‌icer candidates have enjoyed electoral

success in Brazil. The phenomenon is not unique to

Brazil. Elsewhere in Latin America, candidates frequently

play up or exaggerate their connections to law enforce-

ment. In Argentina, Patricia Bullrich made liberal use of

her public security background during electoral cam-

paigns, including a viral moment where a group of police

off‌icers saluted her at a restaurant as if she were their

commander (Clar´

ın.com 2021).

1

Even left-leaning poli-

ticians such as Claudia López, mayor of Bogot´

a, have

appropriated symbols of the security sector for campaign

usage, dressing up like an off‌icer and pretending to drill

new recruits (Reynoso 2023).

Consolidated democracies without histories of military

rule such as the United States can also f‌ind candidates

from the security sector appealing. For instance, a ma-

jority of Congresspeople in the 1970s were veterans, as

was the president (Teigen 2007). Police offers have also

successfully run for off‌ice, notably Eric Adams in New

York City. However, in a country like Brazil that has a

diff‌icult and largely unresolved history of military gov-

ernment and repression where the police played an im-

portant role, these candidacies have raised signif‌icant

attention among the media and civil society (Pagnan and

Rodrigues 2022;Passarinho 2022;Zanini 2022). These

new candidacies lead directly to the question of how

voters perceive a police off‌icer on their ballots. What does

the police off‌icer “brand”mean to Brazilian voters? What

advantages, disadvantages, strengths, and weaknesses

does it imply?

The police off‌icer candidate is a common occurrence in

Brazil across all regions, and is becoming more frequent.

This is true at all levels of government: federal, state, and

municipal. See Figure 1 for plots of this growth for federal

deputies and mayors and Figure 2 for examples of

campaign material from these candidates.

2

The rise of

police candidacies at the municipal level (Figure 1(b))is

particularly striking because the Brazilian constitution

gives municipalities a very minor role in the provision of

public security. The police forces of Brazil are com-

manded at the state and federal levels—by the governor

Turner 993