Police employment is a domain likely to be subject to strategic timing by policymakers. It regards immediately ‘visible’ jobs dealing with salient issues and an area in which local-level authorities still have legal competence. Violent crime and more innocent but subjectively ‘immediate’ forms of street-level crime may have a higher salience among voters than most forms of theft or economic crime. Incumbents can therefore be expected to put particular emphasis on being seen to respond strongly to increases in statistics on such salient forms of crime. An electorally convenient way to do so is by strategically timing the employment of police officers by hiring more officers during election period with tenured civil servant status (most of whom are bobbies on the beat), if needed at the expense of officers with non-tenured public employee status (all of whom perform administrative office duties). In addition to this effect induced by electoral business cycles, larger exogenous political-systemic shocks may cause one-off temporal effects in the form of time-constrained catch-up effects in the political regions affected.
We test these ideas by investigating official crime statistics as well as police employment data for all 16 German states from 1992 to 2008. Given the particular nature of post-unification politics in Germany we also take into account a second Germany-specific time factor – temporally constrained but potentially important transition and catch-up effects in police hiring in Eastern states specifically, (only) shortly after unification. Results show that (1) police employment is mainly driven by structural background constraints such as state debt levels and population density rates, (2) distinct evidence of political timing is found in the form of electioneering in West German states – but only as regards more ‘street-visible’ civil servant police, (3) we find evidence of East-Germany specific temporal catch-up effects in police hiring during the first decade after unification, (4) psychologically salient forms of crime significantly increase administrative employment, while the share of non-German residents increases both types of employment.
