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).

中文翻译：

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民主政府的执法

在本文中，我们分析了政治竞争如何影响公共执法政策的设计。该文章得出两个主要结论（假设执法成本是线性的，犯罪分子的类型是均匀分布的，并且社会足够富裕）：（1）选举竞争不会使轻度和重度犯罪的均衡效率降低（例如，不执行轻罪，完全阻止重罪）；（2）仅在中级犯罪范围内才会出现扭曲现象：小规模犯罪的执法支出低于最佳水平，因此威慑力问题更加严重；相反，对于更严重的犯罪，执法措施要更高，并且与效率要求相比，威慑作用更多（可能超过）。