In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Monique Newton, covers the new article by Margaret L. Boittin, York University, Rachel S. Fisher, University of California, Berkeley, and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, University of California, Berkeley: “Evidence of Caste-Class Discrimination from a Conjoint Analysis of Law Enforcement Officers”.
In Nepal, Dalits are considered the lowest caste in Hindu society. Activists and others have highlighted the existence of police bias against this group while calling on the state to combat caste-based police discrimination against low-caste offenders. But are concerns over systemic bias in policing in Nepal warranted? For example, do police discriminate based on caste and class when choosing what cases to investigate?
In their recent APSR letter, Boittin, Fisher, and Mo use an experiment of Nepal police officers to demonstrate that concerns over systemic bias in policing in Nepal are justified. They examine whether police discriminate in investigation decisions in Nepal and find that across education, income, and caste/ethnicity, police officers prefer to investigate offenders from more disadvantaged backgrounds than those from more advantaged ones. Boittin et al. also find that when officers assess the investigatory preferences of the police at the institutional level, officers perceive there to be caste-based but not class-based biases.
“This letter sheds light on institutional discrimination in policing in which officers may still discriminate, regardless of their personal biases, if they believe they are following the institution’s preferences.” Boittin, Fisher, and Mo use a different method for detecting bias than past policing scholarship: a conjoint experiment. Also, rather than focusing on the use of force by police officers, they focus on what traits police officers prioritize in investigations when given offender characteristics. The authors surveyed 1,065 Nepali police officers from five districts in Nepal’s most populous province to evaluate police bias against caste-class subjugated (CCS) communities, a term adopted from Soss and Weaver’s (2017) American politics research on policing in “race-class subjugated communities.” In the experiment, police officers reviewed pairs of profiles for hypothetical offenders. The offenders were randomly assigned values relating to six attributes: caste/ethnicity, household income, education, gender, age, and crime type. This letter focuses on the first three attributes. Police officers were then asked, “If you had to choose between them, which of these two individuals would you personally prefer to investigate?” as well as, “If you had to choose between them, which of these two individuals do you think the police would investigate?”
The authors find evidence that police officers are more likely to target offenders from CCS communities. Specifically, officers are more likely to personally prefer investigating low-caste Dalit offenders than high-caste Brahmins, poor offenders than wealthy and middle-class ones, and illiterate offenders than literate ones. They also find that officers believe that their institution is more likely to prioritize the investigation of low-caste offenders over high-caste ones, but they do not view their institution as having class-based biases. This letter sheds light on institutional discrimination in policing in which officers may still discriminate, regardless of their personal biases, if they believe they are following the institution’s preferences. The letter adds to the policing scholarship, dominated by research in the US context with race-based inequality and a decentralized police force, by examining the police in a country with another type of ascriptive inequality—caste—and a centralized law enforcement agency. The findings demonstrate that concerns from local activists and international organizations over systemic bias in policing in Nepal are warranted.
- Monique Newton is a 4th-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she studies American Politics and Political Methodology. Her research interests lie at the intersection of urban politics, race and ethnic politics, political behavior, and political psychology. A mixed-method scholar, she employs ethnographic, interview, survey, and experimental methods to examine Black political behavior in American cities in the United States. Her dissertation project explores how Black neighborhoods in the United States respond to the killings of Black Americans by police officers. She currently resides in Chicago, IL.
- BOITTIN, MARGARET L., RACHEL S. FISHER, and CECILIA HYUNJUNG MO. 2023. “Evidence of Caste-Class Discrimination from a Conjoint Analysis of Law Enforcement Officers.”, American Political Science Review
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