Noah Buckley
The police play crucial roles in the interface of state apparatuses and society in any country, let alone in authoritarian contexts where political regime characteristics and legacies of dominance may increase in importance. How does the public view cooperating with the police, this vital state actor, in such potentially-compromised contexts? With co-authors, I address these and related questions using original survey experiments conducted in Russia and Georgia.
Papers Under Review and Conference Papers
- “Cooperating with the State: Evidence from Survey Experiments on Policing” (with Timothy Frye, Scott Gehlbach, and Lauren McCarthy). Journal of Experimental Political Science.
- We examine cooperation with the state using a series of survey experiments on policing conducted in late 2011 in Moscow, Russia, where distrust of the state is high and attempts to reform the police have been ineffective. Through various vignettes that place respondents in situations in which they are the witness or victim of a crime, we experimentally manipulate crime severity, identity of the perpetrator (whether the crime is committed by a police officer), monetary rewards, appeals to civic duty, and the opportunity cost of time spent reporting. Of these factors, crime severity and identity of the perpetrator are robustly associated with a propensity to report. Our research design and results contribute to a large literature on cooperation with the state by examining variables that may be more salient or function differently in countries with weak institutions than in developed democracies.
- Presented at APSA 2012 and MPSA 2013
- “Who Reports? Using Survey Experiments to Explore Cooperation with the State in Russia and Georgia” (with Timothy Frye, Scott Gehlbach, and Lauren McCarthy). Under review.
- What factors affect citizens' willingness to cooperate with the state? We explore this question through a study of citizens' willingness to report crimes to the police, a quintessential form of cooperation with the state apparatus, using data from survey experiments conducted in Russia in December 2012 and Georgia in June 2013. We find that citizens' willingness to report crimes to the police is strongly influenced by the nature of the crime in both countries but not generally by instruments that the state might use to encourage greater reporting. These results suggest skepticism about the ability of governments to easily engineer cooperation with the state. We do, however, find strong effects of one instrument under state control: the guarantee of anonymity to bystanders who report crimes.
- Presented at APSA 2012 and MPSA 2013
- “A Rotten Orchard? Societal Tolerance of Police Misbehavior in Moscow, Russia” (with Timothy Frye and Lauren McCarthy).