Large American cities are usually run by Democrats, but a few have Republican mayors. I’m assuming a Republican presence within a city’s political leadership will have some effect on local policies and policy-related outcomes. Someday I’ll tackle the causal pathways from city politics to policies to outcomes. In this post, I’ll focus on one particular outcome: the violent crime rates of cities with Republican and Democratic mayors.
My sample included all the cities with Republican mayors on Wikipedia’s list of mayors of the 50 largest cities in the US, of which there were ten with Republican mayors. I also chose ten cities with Democratic mayors from the Wikipedia list. Only after identifying all 20 cities for my sample, I looked up and averaged their violent crime rates, using data provided by the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Here is what I found:
So the big cities with Republican mayors had lower violent crime rates than those with Democratic mayors. Does this mean they had better crime reduction policies? I don’t know. But I’ll continue exploring the issue.