Abstract

Prior research documents the importance of race, prejudice, and partisanship in shaping mass position-taking on police reform; however, little-to-no research explores self-interest as a potentially operative factor—especially for reforms affecting police budgets and service capacity. We identify a form of self-interest theoretically present for voters when considering “defund the police” proposals and utilize as a test case a police defunding ballot initiative in Los Angeles County with a rare feature rendering it uniquely well-suited for detecting voter self-interest: it targeted the county sheriff's department and was voted on by county residents under and not under this agency's jurisdiction. Using a spatial discontinuity design leveraging contiguous election precincts along different sides of the sheriff department's jurisdictional boundaries, we find little-to-no evidence that voters sought to protect the budget—and thus service capacity—of their public safety provider. Instead, we find evidence that voting was largely driven by anti-minority orientations.

Keywords: self-interest | police | policing | defund

Roman, M., & Newman, B. (2025). Self-interest and voter support for defund the police. Electoral Studies, 96, 102958. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2025.102958