Law Enforcement with a Democratic Government

Eric Langlais and Marie Obidzinski

American Law and Economics Review, 2017, vol. 19, issue 1, 162-201

Abstract: In this article, we analyze how political competition affects the design of public law enforcement policies. The article arrives at two main conclusions (assuming that the cost of enforcement is linear, criminal’s type is uniformly distributed, and the society is wealthy enough): (1) electoral competition entails no loss of efficiency at equilibrium for both minor and major offenses (e.g., minor offenses are not enforced, while major ones are fully deterred); (2) distortions arises at equilibrium only in the range of intermediate offenses: enforcement expenditure for small offenses is lower than at optimal level, such that the issue of under-deterrence is exacerbated; in contrast, for more serious offenses, enforcement measures are higher, and there is more (possibly, over) deterrence as compared to what efficiency requires. We show that these results also generalize under more general assumptions, except that full deterrence of major offenses is no longer achievable (a less wealthy society), or enforcement expenditure is bounded above (under convex enforcement costs).

JEL-codes: D72 D73 H1 K14 K23 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aler/ahw015 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Law enforcement with a democratic government (2017)
Working Paper: Law enforcement with a democratic government (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:19:y:2017:i:1:p:162-201.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

American Law and Economics Review is currently edited by J.J. Prescott and Albert Choi

More articles in American Law and Economics Review from American Law and Economics Association Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().