Political Culture and Police Behavior

8/20/2019 Political Culture and Police Behavior

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The effect of local political culture on policing behaviors in the

1990s: A retest of Wilson’s theory in more contemporary times

Jihong Zhao a ,⁎, Ni He b , Nicholas Lovrich c

a Department of Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE 68182, United States

b College of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, United Statesc Department of Political Science, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164, United States

Abstract

In research on policing, James Q. Wilson was among the first scholars to suggest that local political culture constitutes a significant

factor in explaining variation among law enforcement agency practices. Almost forty years after the publication of Varieties of Police

Behavior, a classic study of police organizational behavior, Wilson’s monograph remains the basis of a widely held theory used to

explain variation in police agency behaviors. More specifically, Wilson (1968) identified three distinctive styles of policing: the

legalistic, the watchman, and the service styles. In his empirical work with these styles of policing, Wilson argued that local political

culture was the major determinant of variation in policing styles. The purpose of this study was to retest the validity of Wilson ’s

argument in today’s policing environment. Using panel data collected among police agencies across the U.S. surveyed in 1993, 1996,

and 2000, the authors found that there was little evidence to support the application of Wilson’s theory to the practices of

contemporary police organizations.© 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Decentralization is a defining feature of American

democracy (e.g., Gabriel, 1956) and the principle of fed-

eralism is intended to serve as an institutional guarantee of

decentralization in American political life (Conlan, 1998,

pp. 309–

316). A good example of this decentralization isfound in the great variety of local government policies and

special districts serving local government residents across

the country (Lorch, 2001, pp. 227–266). Political sci-

entists had long argued that distinctive political cultures

were present at the local level. For example, Elazar (1975,

pp. 13–16) identified three principal historical sources of

local political culture; in his own words he noted, “Three

aspects of political culture stand out as particularly in-

fluential in shaping the operation of the American political

system.” They are: (1) the set of citizen perceptions of

what goals are properly pursued through politics, (2) the

kinds of people who become active in government and

politics based on their established traditions, and (3) the

actual way in which the art of governance is practiced asreflected in the structure and operation of local govern-

ment (Elazar, 1975; also see Elazar, 1970, 2002). In this

study, the authors examined the effect of the third prin-

cipal source of local political culture on the variation of

local government agency practices identified by both

Daniel Elazar and James Q. Wilson as critical to the con-

duct of local government business. Government structures

are clearly known to have a strong impact on policy

outcomes in the area of management styles (Williams &

Adrian, 1963), equal employment opportunity efforts

Journal of Criminal Justice 34 (2006) 569 –578

⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 402 554 3928.

E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Zhao).

0047-2352/$ - see front matter © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2006.09.011

mailto:[email protected]://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2006.09.011http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2006.09.011mailto:[email protected]


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(Salzstein, 1986; Warner, Steel, & Lovrich, 1989), and

crime rates (Stucky, 2003). James Q. Wilson applied

that same line of reasoning to policing practices.

After almost forty years, it is fair to say that Wilson’s

(1968) book, Varieties of Police Behavior (hereafter

referred to as Varieties), continues to be one of the most influential scholarly works in American policing. Not

surprisingly, a cursory review of the police literature

showed that almost every textbook on American police

featured a description of Wilson’s three styles of

policing (e.g., Bartollas & Hahn, 1999; Carter &

Radelet, 1999; Fyfe, Greene, Walsh, Wilson, &

McLaren, 1997; Langworthy & Travis, 2003; Peak,

2003; Roberg, Crank, & Kuykendall, 2000; Walker &

Katz, 2003). The social science citation index listed 620

citations of Wilson’s book in the period 1980 to 2004.

Citation and page analyses indicated that Wilson’sscholarship was among the most prominent and widely

cited in the police and criminal justice literature and his

book, Varieties, had been ranked among the most often

cited contributions to the literature in the field of crim-

inal justice (Cohn, Farrington, & Wright, 1998; Wright

& Miller, 1998).

In the1970s and 1980s, several highly regarded scholars

noted the importance of the book to serious research on the

police. For example, in the late 1970s, Dorothy Guyot

(1977) argued that Varieties was the lone exception to the

general lack of credible empirical research on police

organizations. Langworthy (1986, p. 32) suggested that Wilson’s theory of police behavior “remains the only

empirically derived theory of police organization to date.”

Similarly, Slovak (1986, p. 5) lamented that “there is a very

real sense in which the promise offered by Wilson’s

original analysis has gone unfulfilled.” In their recent

review of research on policing, Maguire and Uchida (2000)

found that the influence of Variety had remained very

strong over the decades since original publication.

The purpose of this article is to reexamine Wilson’s

theory about the relationship between local political

culture (variation in local government structure) and priorities of policing (law enforcement, order mainte-

nance, and provision of services). Different from all

previous studies, this research was based upon panel

survey data collected among law enforcement executives

heading 281 U.S. municipal police departments surveyed

in first 1993, in again 1996, and yet again in 2000. In

addition, a tandem survey of municipal clerks was sent to

each police agency’s city government in case of those

three years. In the analysis to follow, the authors are going

to use the same variables specified in Wilson’s book,

Varieties, to measure local political culture throughout the

empirical analysis reported here.

Literature review

The decentralization resulting from federalism in the

American political system creates a multilevel of local

government agencies in charge of a wide array of public

services provided to local communities. For example, in thearea of police services, agency practices differ widely

across communities; some agencies focus heavily on

traditional law enforcement goals exclusively, while others

are engaged in efforts to address social disorder on a wide

array of socioeconomic fronts. Over the three past decades,

several perspectives have emerged as to why variations in

public service delivery system have taken the different

patterns present in U.S. cities. Elazar (1975), for example,

suggested that the answer could be found in the history of

settlement of local communities. He identified three

distinctive strains of American political culture, namely:(1) individualistic, (2) moralistic, and (3) traditionalistic.

Each strain of political culture has its own perspective

regarding the role of government, the function of

bureaucracy, and patterns of belief among local residents

about the proper goals of political activity. Localities differ

in the mix of political culture strains present and those

different mixes are associated with different types of local

politics and local government services (see Elazar, 1998).

Other political scientists had demonstrated that the

elements of local government structure such as the gender

and ethnicity of the chief administrator, the composition

of the municipal council, and the method of election of public officials were predictors of variation in services

among municipalities (e.g., Williams & Adrian, 1963).

Lineberry and Fowler (1967) for example, identified the

local government structure from the least reformed

(mayor-council, partisan election with all council mem-

bers elected from districts) to most reformed government

(council-manager, nonpartisan with all council members

elected at-large). Further, they found that the allocation of

financial resources differed significantly between the least

reformed versus the most reformed government. Recent-

ly, Stucky (2003) reported that crime patterns variedsystematically by local government structures (also see

Salzstein, 1986; Warner et al., 1989).

Three styles of policing

The historical roots of Wilson’s Varieties can be traced

back to the scholarship being produced in political science

in the early 1960s. At that time the documentation of the

relationship between local governmental institutional

arrangements, prevailing political values, and the result-

ing practices of government was a focus of scholarly

inquiry in the discipline (see Dye, 2002, pp. 11–29; Orren

570 J. Zhao et al. / Journal of Criminal Justice 34 (2006) 569 – 578


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& Skrowronek, 1995, pp. 296–317; Seidelman &

Harpham, 1985, pp. 7–18). Carried out with the help of

Harvard graduate students in government, Wilson’s

(1968) seminal work was based on observations collected

from field trips to eight police departments located in

several states. After reviewing the results of extensiveinterviews with officers of all ranks, intensive field work

in the communities in question, and the collection of

departmental official records, Wilson identified three

distinctive styles of policing–namely, the legalistic, the

watchman, and the service-oriented styles.

Police departments manifesting a legalistic style of

policing reflected the organizational values of a bureau-

cratic approach to policing. Professionalism and impar-

tiality were viewed as the most essential elements of

organizational operation, and strict enforcement of the law

was a top priority. In this regard, Wilson observed “

thelegalistic police style encourages patrolmen to take a law

enforcement view of the situation they encounter …” (1968,

p. 188). Wilson found that officers working in a legalistic

style police department tended to be highly productive in

their law enforcement activities as viewed from the stand-

point of enforcement activity. For example, these officers

had high arrest rates of juvenile offenders and tended to

issue a large number of traffic tickets to motorists. The

oraizational structure of legalistic departments was typi-

cally strictly hierarchical and decidedly specialized. Here,

decision making was overwhelmingly top–down, with

relatively little input solicited from rank-and-file offiers.Wilson referred to the legalistic style of policing as

“institutional” because it emphasized organizational

mechaisms and functional rationality in achieving its goals.

In contrast, the watchman style of policing stressed the

order-maintenance function of law enforcement. Primary

attention in this setting was given to controlling social

disorder in the local community. Wilson (1968) suggested

that the watchman style of policing was similar to the

“communal” model of policing wherein police officers

acted as “craftsmen” in the maintenance of civic order and

were deeply involved with the community they serve. Hefound that, “In some communities, the police in dealing

with situations that do not involve serious crime act as if

order maintenance rather than law enforcement were their

principal function” (Wilson, 1968, p. 140). In addition,

Wilson noted the following with respect to these agencies:

“The police are watchman-like not simply in emphasizing

order over law enforcement but also in judging the

seriousness of infractions less by what the law says about

them than by their immediate and personal conse-

quences…” (Wilson, 1968, p. 141).

Those police departments which manifested a service

orientation were inclined to emphasize community

residents’ satisfaction as a major organizational goal.

Accordingly, police officers took all requests for both law

enforcement and order maintenance seriously. Crimes

such as burglaries and robberies took precedence over

minor infractions of the law, and “arrests are avoided

when possible but there will be frequent use of informalnonarrest sanctions…” (Wilson, 1968, p. 201). A good

public relationship with the community, and responsive-

ness to community needs, were the major concerns of all

ranks within the service style of policing law enforcement

agency.

The predictor of policing styles: local political

culture

After identifying these three styles of policing,

Wilson (1968) argued that the major determinant of variation in police behavior was the prevailing local

political culture:

Thus, police work is carried out under the influence

of a political culture…By political culture is meant

those widely shared expectations as to how issues

will be raised, governmental objectives determined,

and power for their attainment assembled; it is an

understanding of what makes a government legit-

imate. (pp. 228–235)

Empirically, Wilson operationalized the concept of

political culture as represented by the type of localgovernment in existence where his subject police agencies

were located. Four types of local government were

identified: (1) high-professional council-manager, (2)

low-professional council-manager, (3) nonpartisan

mayor-council, and (4) partisan mayor-council. More

specifically, cities with high-professional council-manag-

er regimes were termed “good government ” settings while

cities with partisan mayor-council regimes were termed

“traditional” government settings. Wilson clearly linked

the “good government ” form of local government and

political culture with the legalistic style of policing. Not surprisingly, the emergence and development of the city

manager position was a parallel phenomenon to the

emergence of the bureaucratic model of policing-sharing

the assumptions of the politics and administration

dichotomy and the propriety of independent professional

control of public organizations.

Wilson stated that the watchman style of policing

was associated with the partisan mayor-council form of

government and its underlying political culture. An

important feature of this policing style was that the

police department was continually open to the influence

of local politics. Finally, a department with a service



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orientation was linked to both low-professional council-

manager and non-partisan mayor-council governments,

wherein a strong sense of public service duty prevails

and egalitarian values predominant. Nonpartisanship,

collective efforts, and community service work were

strong elements of this political culture, and these valuesdictated a high concern for citizen satisfaction for the

local police operating in the environment of such a

political culture.

Wilson tested the hypothesized theoretical linkage

between political culture and variation of policing style by

examining the types of local government identified and

the arrest rates for specific crimes in corresponding police

departments. Two principal data sets were used in

Wilson’s analyses. The first data set concerning the

types of local government institutional arrangements was

obtained from the International City Management Association (ICMA). The second data set involved arrest

rates used as indicators of variation in police behavior, and

these data were collected from arrest rates maintained by

the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wilson controlled for

size of the city, median family income of the city

population, and the percent of non-White population; 146

police agencies were included in his empirical analysis.

Wilson (1968) hypothesized as follows:

…the more partisan the political system, the more

politicians represent small geographic constituencies,

and the more nonprofessional the executive head of thegovernment, the more likely the city will have a po-

litical culture favorable to the watchman police style.

By contrast, cities electing nonpartisan officials at large

and vesting executive authority in a highly professional

city manager will more likely have a political culture

favoring the legalistic police style. (p. 272)

The findings reported by Wilson indicated a clear

distinction between legalistic and watchman departments

as judged from arrest rate patterns (disorderly conduct

versus larceny and driving while intoxicated). The

empirical results documented in this analysis supportedWilson’s hypothesis: “In sum, the theory that the political

culture of a community constrains law enforcement styles

survives the crude and inadequate statistical tests that

available data permit ” (Wilson, 1968, p. 276). In addition,

the findings derived from his analysis of ICMA and FBI

UCR data supported his hypothesis that the service style

of policing emphasized both the law enforcement and

order maintenance functions of policing.

It was interesting to note that the historical develop-

ment of American policing in the first seven decades of

the twentieth century witnessed the steady transformation

from the watchman style of policing to a professional

force that began with the push from the progressive

movement and a group of reform-minded police admin-

istrators such as August Vollmer at Berkeley, California

during the 1930s, and O. W. Wilson’s reform of the

Chicago Police Department during the 1960s (Rubinstein,

1973; Walker, 1977). Kelling and Moore (1988) suc-cinctly characterized the history of police reform as falling

into three eras: the political, the reform, and the commu-

nity eras. The political era captured the characteristics of

the watchman style of policing in which the authority of

policing was derived from the local community and

politicians, while the authorization of policing in the

reform era was clearly based on the rule of law.

Since the publication of Varieties, several scholars

attempted to replicate Wilson’s findings. First, Lang-

worthy (1985) examined 152 police agencies serving

city populations over 100,000 in an attempt to demon-strate the viability of Wilson’s observations. Using FBI

1975 arrest data in the analysis, he found only partial

support for Wilson’s theory. Langworthy wrote in this

regard: “The expectation that arrest rates for larceny and

driving while intoxicated would be higher in ‘good’

government cities than in traditional cities is supported”

(Langworthy, 1985, p. 97). The socioeconomic char-

acteristics of these 152 cities, however, were not con-

trolled for in his analysis; hence these findings represent

only a limited test of Wilson’s ideas.

Using a sample of small and medium-sized municipal

police departments in Illinois, Crank (1990) testedcompeting factors (e.g., racial-cultural differentiation,

economic conditions, organizational environment, and

local political culture) using the number of police arrests

reported by the State Police of Illinois for offenses such

as trespass, disorderly conduct, cannabis control, and

motor vehicle offenses. Crank ’s findings revealed that

the presence of a city-manager style of government was

associated with significant increases in arrests for dis-

orderly conduct, motor vehicle offenses, and cannabis

control. Crank ’s test of police behavior, however, did not

employ the original measures of local political culturedeveloped by Wilson. For example, local partisan

election was not used to distinguish between different

styles of local government structure (e.g., commission-

council style of government). Similarly, Pursley (1976)

found that the number of police departments with

“reform” police chiefs was significantly higher in the

council-manager type of governments than in mayor-

council governments.

Recently, using data derived from a 1998 survey of

large police agencies, researchers Hassell, Zhao, and

Maguire (2003) also examined the relationship between

styles of policing and law enforcement organizational



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arrangements. According to Wilson, formalization (dis-

tribution of authority, senior management versus first line

supervisor and number of rules), vertical differentiation

(number of ranks), and functional differentiation (number

of special units) should differ among the three categories

of police agencies. For example, legalistic police depart-ments are more likely to be formalized, centralized, and

functionally limited than watchman police agencies. In

this test of Wilson’s predictions, the empirical findings

failed to support Wilson’s argument that structural

arrangements among these three styles of policing vary

predictably (Hassell et al., 2003).

The several studies summarized above found varying

degrees of support for the salience of Wilson’s

categories and the utility of his theory linking political

culture to styles of policing. Given the influence of

Wilson’s Varieties and the continuing widespread reporting of these linkages, it was indeed important to

retest his theory using more contemporary data.

Fortunately, an appropriate set of panel data captured

at three points in time during the 1990s was available for

such an analysis.

Methodology

Data sources

The information concerning local political culture

used in this analysis was obtained through three wavesof surveys of municipal agencies. The Division of Gov-

ernmental Studies and Services (DGSS) at Washington

State University conducted a series of agency surveys in

1993, in 1996, and again in 2000. The staff of DGSS

conducted mail surveys directed to the same set of 281

municipalities located in forty-seven states in roughly

three-year intervals since 1978. The cities in the original

sample were selected from among those municipalities

initially surveyed in a nationwide survey of cities of

over 25,000 population conducted by the International

City Management Association in 1969. In the 2000round of the periodic survey, 233 cities (82.9 percent) in

the sample participated. In year 1996, 244 (86.8 percent)

cities completed and returned survey questionnaires. In

1993, the survey responses of 241 (85.8 percent) cities

were available for analysis. The consistently high return

rates yielded a core sample of 185 (65.85 percent) cities

which returned completed survey instruments in all

three national surveys.

Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data published by the

Federal Bureau of Investigation provides the information

required on police arrests. UCR data are collected as part

of a nationwide effort to gather data on crimes reported to

police from approximately 17,000 state, county, and city

law enforcement agencies voluntarily reporting reported

crimes and police arrests in each jurisdiction. The data

used here included the 1993, 1996, and 2000 UCR data

on police arrests in the cities included in the current

study. Only police agencies that reported completetwelve-month crime statistics in a given year were

selected for the analysis. Wilson used the same catego-

ries of UCR arrest data some forty years ago. Lastly, data

used for the four demographic characteristics in each city

(i.e., city population, percentage of minority population,

percentage of workforce unemployed, and percentage of

young people from fifteen years to twenty-four years

old) were derived from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census

counts.

Measures

Dependent variables

Four dependent variables were used in this study: (1)

larceny arrest rate per 1,000 population; (2) drunkenness

arrest rate per 1,000 population; (3) DWI arrest rate per

1,000 population; and (4) disorderly conduct arrest rate

per 1,000 population. In fixed-effect ordinary least

square regression models using panel data, each of the

four dependent variables was regressed on a set of

independent variables (see Appendix A for model

specifications).

Independent variables

In Varieties, Wilson identified three distinctive types

of local political culture reflected in their structural

arrangements for governance. More specifically, type of

local mayoral election, relationship between city chief

administrator and city council, previous experience of

the administrator, and educational attainment of the

administrator were all important characteristics used to

determine the three types of prevailing local politicalculture. An earlier study on the influence of local

political culture on police innovations showed that over

96 percent of city chief administrators had college

degrees (using a sample of 281 cities with populations

ranging from 25,000 to 3,000,000) (Zhao, 1996). This

finding suggested that unlike the situation forty years

ago, virtually all city administrators today possess a

college degree. As a consequence of this fact, this

particular item was excluded from the measure of local

political culture.

Following Wilson’s coding method, the three types

of local political culture were operationalized as: (1)



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professional government : council-manager form of

government, nonpartisan election, and the manager

has previous experience in city management (which

corresponds to legalistic style police agencies); (2) tra-

ditional government : mayor-council form of govern-

ment and the mayoral election is partisan (whichcorresponds to watchman style police agencies); and

(3) mixed type of government : mayor-council form of

government where mayoral election is nonpartisan or

council-manager government where the election is

partisan (corresponding to service style police agencies).

In this study, traditional government was treated as the

reference group.

Control variables

In his study, Wilson controlled for the socioeconomicconditions in the cities under investigation. He included

three aggregate demographic control measures: size,

economic conditions, and racial composition. Wilson

(1968, p. 272) argued that “controlling for such factors

should eliminate any large differences in the true, but

necessarily unknown, crime rate because crime varies

significantly with city size, social class, and racial

composition.”

Similar variables were used to control for the effects

of socioeconomic factors. Four control variables were

included in the analysis: (1) city (population) size; (2)

percentage of minorities in a city (percentage of non-White); (3) percentage of unemployed; and (4) percent-

age of persons aged fifteen to twenty-four. Demographic

data for all of these variables were obtained from the

1990 and 2000 decennial census counts of the U.S.

population. Since the census data were available for

each decade, the authors created a measure estimating

the change in socioeconomic characteristics taking place

over the period 1990 to 2000. The time-varying socio-

economic variables were estimated via a linear trend

calculation (also see Kovandzic, Sloan, & Vieraitis,

2002).In addition to these control variables, a total of forty-

six state dummy (the first listed state in the data set,

Alabama, was used as the reference group) and two

years of observation dummy variables (i.e., 1996 and

2000, 1993 was the reference group) were included in

the statistical analyses. Consideration of state and

regional variations was important to incorporate in the

analysis because numerous studies had demonstrated

important geographic effects on the structure and

operations of municipal police departments (Maguire,

Kuhns, Uchida, & Cox, 1997; Warner et al., 1989; Zhao

& Lovrich, 1998).

Findings

This section reports the primary findings of the

replication of Wilson’s theory of local political culture

determinants of policing styles in U.S. cities. Descrip-

tive statistics for all variables included in the analysis areshown in Table 1. Comparing across all four dependent

variables in each of the three time periods, the arrest

rates (per 1,000 population) were consistently ranked

from high to low in the following order: larceny,

drunkenness, DWI, and disorderly conduct. Although

ANOVA tests revealed some overall differences in the

four categories of arrest rates across three waves of data,

more in-depth comparisons based on post hoc Bonfer-

roni tests suggested more specific patterns. Statistically

significant between-years (i.e., year 2000 compared to

year 1996; and year 2000 compared to year 1993) dif-ferences were found in the larceny, DWI, and disorderly

conduct arrest rates. The only statistically significant

difference between drunkenness arrest rates was found

in the year 2000 and year 1993 comparison.

The majority of the municipalities included in the

sample had either a professional council-manager type of

government (varying from 39 percent to 44 percent in

three waves of data), or a mixed type of government type

Table 1

Descriptive statistics

Variables 2000 1996 1993

Mean (S.D.) Mean (S.D.) Mean (S.D.)

Dependent variables

(per 1,000 pop.)

Larceny rate⁎,a,c 5.64 (3.32) 7.71 (4.32) 7.91 (4.11)

Drunkenness rate⁎,c 5.03 (4.32) 3.67 (4.91) 2.70 (10.77)

DWI rate⁎,a,c 4.21 (3.39) 2.53 (3.80) 1.63 (4.46)

Disorderly rate⁎,a,c 2.66 (3.05) 0.23 (0.96) 0.64 (2.31)

Independent variables

Professional

government (1 = yes)

0.41 (0.49) 0.39 (0.49) 0.44 (0.50)

Traditionalgovernment (1 = yes)

0.13 (0.32) 0.14 (0.32) 0.14 (0.34)

Mixed type

government (1 = yes)

0.46 (0.50) 0.47 (0.50) 0.42 (0.49)

Control variables

Population (x 100,000) 1.88 (3.39) 1.90 (3.00) 1.81 (3.17)

Percent minority⁎,b,c 38.71 (22.90) 34.88 (21.88) 29.90 (20.95)

Percent unemployed 6.68 (2.88) 6.80 (2.74) 6.81 (3.03)

Percent

15–24 years old

15.58 (5.34) 15.84 (4.83) 16.14 (5.11)

⁎ Anova test, p b .05.a Post hoc Bonferroni test, 2000 and 1996, p b .05. b

Post hoc Bonferroni test, 1996 and 1993, p b

.05.c Post hoc Bonferroni test, 2000 and 1993, p b .05.



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(varying from 42 percent to 47 percent in three waves of

data). The average city population in the sample varied

from 181,000 (in 1993) to 190,000 (in 1996) and to

188,000 (in 2000). The mean percentage minority pop-

ulation in the sample varied from about 30 percent (in

1993) to about 39 percent (in 2000), a statistically

significant increase. The mean percentage of workforce

unemployment remained relatively stable, at slightly less

than 7 percent in the time periods ranging from 1993 to

2000. The average population of young people (age

fifteen to twenty-four) also remained rather stable in thesame time period, averaging about 16 percent.

Table 2 reports the impact of political culture on two

major categories of police arrests: law enforcement

oriented (larceny and DWI) and order maintenance-

related (drunkenness and disorderly conduct). Accord-

ing to Wilson (1968, p. 274), legalistic police agencies,

which were located in communities with professional

political cultures, should have higher arrest rates for the

first two offense types. Watchman-style police depart-

ments, which were located in communities with tradi-

tional political cultures, should have higher arrest rateson the latter two offense types. The results of these

analyses suggested that political culture, as measured by

the forms of municipal government, had no statistically

significant impact on either law enforcement oriented or

order maintenance oriented police arrests.

In contrast, significant effects were found in selected

social demographic variables. For example, the percent-

age of young people living in a given city was positively

related to DWI and disorderly conduct-related police

arrests in that city. Unemployment rate was positively

associated with disorderly conduct-related arrests, but

not with the other types of arrests. In addition, the per-

centage of minority population was negatively associat-

ed with DWI-related arrests, but that variable was

unrelated to the other types of arrests under investigation.

Among the two year dummy variables included in the

analyses, year 2000 was a statistically significant pre-

dictor for all four types of police arrest rates. Controlling

for all the other variables, there were more DWI–,

drunkenness–, and disorder conduct –related arrests in

year 2000 compared to those of 1993. Larceny arrest

rates for the year 2000, however, were significantly

lower that those of 1993. Overall, with the addition of state dummy variables, the regression models explained

between 30 percent and 52 percent of the variation in the

dependent variables.

Discussion and conclusion

The purpose of this study was to reassess the utility of

Wilson’s theory of the linkage between local political

culture and styles of policing as evidenced in aggregate

arrest rates for various reported crimes. Longitudinal

agency survey data collected in 1993, 1996, and 2000from 185 U.S. cities were utilized in the analysis. In

addition, the authors controlled for both time and place

(state) in the statistical model, and the authors used

essentially the same variables as those used by Wilson

nearly forty years ago. Overall, the findings did not find

support for Wilson’s theory of local political culture in

explaining today’ s police organizational behavior. There

was no evidence of the effect of local government culture

as specified by James Q. Wilson on arrest rates among

these many contemporary American police agencies.

Why is political culture no longer a strong predictor

of patterns of organizational behavior among large

Table 2

Fixed-effect panel data analyses predicting legalistic and watchman policing outcomes: using least square regression with robust standard errors

(robust standard errors in parentheses)

Law enforcement oriented Order maintenance oriented

Larceny DWI Drunkenness Disorder

b b b b

Professional government (1 = yes) −0.015 (0.491) 0.506 (0.513) 0.949 (1.110) −0.769 (0.995)

Mixed type government (1 = yes) −0.364 (0.444) −0.007 (0.443) 1.513 (1.090) −0.741 (1.022)

Population (x 100,000) −0.000 (0.000) −0.000 (0.000) −0.000 (0.000) 0.000 (0.000)

Percent minority −0.003 (0.011) −0.033⁎ (0.012) −0.067 (0.039) −0.012 (0.011)

Percent unemployed 0.127 (0.068) 0.0210 (0.086) 1.311 (0.857) 0.172⁎ (0.064)

Percent 15–24 years old 0.009 (0.027) 0.129⁎ (0.043) 0.037 (0.109) 0.086⁎ (0.033)

Year 1996 −0.237 (0.345) 1.097⁎ (0.510) 0.357 (1.015) −0.172 (0.224)

Year 2000 −2.196⁎ (0.340) 3.430⁎ (0.549) 4.082⁎ (0.849) 2.304⁎ (0.279)

(State dummies omitted)

Adjusted R 2 .524 .298 .335 .379

n 535 474 357 371

⁎ p b .05.



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police agencies? The authors would like to offer three

speculations that center on the changes in the character

of police work taking place over the course of the past

forty years. The first speculation concerns the dramatic

increase in crime rates occurring shortly after the com-

pletion of Wilson’s study in the mid-1960s. Thehistorical trend of crime rates in the U.S. was that

crime incidents per 100,000 population began to climb

rapidly in the late 1960s. Based on the Uniform Crime

Report of the FBI, the rate of increase was even faster in

the 1970s and 1980s than it had been in the late 1960s.

Fear of crime, particularly violent street crime captured

the attention of ordinary Americans (e.g., Wilson, 1985).

Police agencies across the nation witnessed politicians

at all levels of government using the fear of crime in

their political appeals, and “getting tough on crime”

once elected to office (Lyons, 2002; Scheingold, 1984).Studies conducted in the 1990s had documented the fact

that police agencies, large and small alike, consistently

rated crime control as their top priority followed by

social disorder regardless of their local crime rate and

regardless of social demographic factors (Zhao, He, &

Lovrich, 2003). Similarly, scholars of American polic-

ing had long argued that law enforcement was the core

mission of contemporary American police agencies

(Bittner, 1970; Cao, 2004; Manning, 1988).

The second speculation concerned change in the

organizational arrangements in place within contempo-

rary police agencies. In the mid-1960s, specialization(number of special units) and formalization (rules and

policies) were rather limited among police organiza-

tions. Consequently, Wilson found that police depart-

ments characterized as watchman style did not have

much formalization and specialization compared to their

counterparts of legalistic style. Since the period in which

Wilson conducted his studies, police departments had

changed significantly in this regard, as a result of both

external and internal pressures. Formalization, for ex-

ample, is a major feature of organizational life in

contemporary law enforcement, virtually all agenciesmaintained detailed policy and procedure documents. In

fact, research studies consistently point to formalization

as a major trait of contemporary American law en-

forcement agencies (Langworthy, 1986; Zhao, 1996).

In the Law Enforcement Management and Adminis-

trative Statistics (1999) survey, virtually all of the large

police agencies reported having internal policies on use

of force, code of conduct and appearance, the handling of

domestic disputes, hot pursuits, etc. In terms of external

pressures, the data used for this article indicated that

around 20 percent of municipal police departments

surveyed in 1993, 1996, and 2000 were under court order

to promote equal employment opportunity by hiring

additional minority and female officers. Organizational

change in this area is not a luxury, but rather more of a

necessity for contemporary police agencies. The authors

can use the Omaha Police Department as a case in point

to illustrate how much has changed in this area over theyears. The Omaha Police Department has been trans-

formed from a watchman style of policing operation to a

professional style of policing organization without a

corresponding change in local government structure.

According to the Wilson classification of policing

styles, the Omaha Police Department should adhere to

the watchman style (mayor-council type of government

with partisan election). In fact, however, the Omaha P.D.

is highly differentiated in operations by having a gang

unit, organized crime unit, traffic unit, pawn unit, and

even a nuisance unit. At the same time, the department ishighly formalized featuring extensive policies on use of

force, racial profiling, hot pursuit, etc. In addition,

Wilson observed in the watchman style police depart-

ments he studied that educational requirements were

minimal: “In none of the three cities has a high school

diploma been required for entrance into the force and

many officers could not meet such a requirement were it

imposed” (Wilson, 1968, p. 152). Today, over 50 per-

cent of police officers in the Omaha Police Department

possess a college degree. Finally, Wilson found that

police officers working in watchman style departments

tended to be poorly paid: “Patrolmen are locally re-cruited, paid low salaries, expected to have second jobs”

(Wilson, 1968, p. 151). The entry-level salary for an

Omaha police officer is the highest in the metropolitan

area (featuring over fifteen agencies).

The third speculation is related to the expanding

influence of the federal government in law enforcement

policies and practices. There has been significant federal

government involvement with respect to how police

work should be conducted. Prior to Wilson’s study, the

influence of the federal government on local law

enforcement agencies was rather minimal. Since the1970s, however, the federal government has played a

much more important role in influencing the organiza-

tional behavior of police agencies across the entire

country. Walker (1999) observed that in the late 1960s,

American police agencies emerged in the national

spotlight. Presidential commissions and the Law En-

forcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) collec-

tively played a major part in professionalizing law

enforcement agencies. In 1973, the American Bar

Association (ABA) published its Standards Relating to

the Urban Police Function. This was a reflection of a

growing body of research on policing and the emergence



9/10

of a deeper level of understanding of the role that police

departments should play in a democratic society on the

part of major stakeholder groups in American society

(Walker, 1999, p. 35).

In the most recent concrete example of such an

understanding, the Crime Control Act of 1994 empha-sized the systematic redeployment of police resources into

community policing activities. Over 11,000 law enforce-

ment agencies had received federal funding (around $7

billion) distributed through the Office of Community

Oriented Policing Services. Along with those funds, these

agencies have had to adapt themselves to federal

requirements for building police-community partner-

ships. All of these federal and associated state efforts to

promote community policing have contributed in a major

way to the standardization of police work, which in turn

reduces the influence of local political culture on police policies and practices.

This article calls into question one of the most classic

pieces of scholarship in the policing. Wilson’s important

demonstration of the creative application of empirical

methods to the development of theory in policing is

routinely cited in textbooks and in scholarly writings

about the police. This article makes the argument that

new research is needed to examine the effect of local

political culture on contemporary policing in the U.S.,

and notes that a theory which once could be relied upon

to explain variation of police practices across local

government jurisdictions can no longer serve that function. Such is likely the case in a good deal of social

sciences, and social scientists would be wise to revisit

their favorite theories in the way that was done here with

Wilson’s classic work. This analysis was not intended to

demean the foundational work of James Q. Wilson, but

rather to deepen the authors’ understanding of the

limitations of that work and demonstrate the wisdom of

the periodic replication of classic social science

scholarship (see Cao, 2003).

Appendix A. Statistical model

The authors used pooled cross-sectional time-series

(or panel data) analysis in the study reported here. Based

on a set of well-established criteria from the field of

econometrics (cf. Baltagi, 2001; Judge, Hill, Griffiths,

Lutkepohl, & Lee, 1988), the authors specified fixed-

effects model estimation as the most appropriate tech-

nique for the study. The Breusch and Pagan Lagrangian

multiplier test for random effects and the Hausman

specification test were examined systematically. The

Hausman test results indicated that coefficients associ-

ated with fixed-effect and random-effects models were

significantly different from one another. The Breusch

and Pagan test results weighed in favor of the fixed-effect

model.

The general model can be written as:

Yit ¼ b V Xit þ ai þ gt þ eit E ai ¼ E eit ¼ 0 E ai2 ¼ ra2; E aia j ¼ 0 for i p j E eit e js ¼ re2; if i p j and t p s ð E eit e js ¼ 0; otherwiseÞ

where Y it was the dependent variable for city i at year t.

The symbol Xit represented a set of explanatory

variables, and εit represented the error term. The state-

specific effect was measured by αi (forty-six state

dummies were used out of a total of forty-seven states

included in the sample, Alabama was the reference

category). The time-specific component γt represented

two year dummy variables (1996 and 2000, 1993 was

the reference category) that controlled for the unknown

factors affecting the variation in policing styles that were

not accounted for by the other variables. It was also

assumed that αi,γt , and εit were uncorrelated with Xit

(Baltagi, 2001; Hsiao, 1995, 2003; Judge et al., 1988).

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