Distributive Politics and Crime

We examine whether and how central-to-local fiscal transfers reduce crime, an important but understudied aspect of distributive politics. Estimating the causal effect of redistribution on crime is complicated by the problem of simultaneity: transfers may be targeted precisely where crime is a problem. Our research design takes advantage of municipality-level panel data from Japan spanning a major electoral system reform that reduced the level of malapportionment across districts. This provides an opportunity to use the change in malapportionment as an instrumental variable, as malapportionment affects redistribution outcomes, but the change caused by the reform is orthogonal to local crime rates. Naive estimates show almost no effect of transfers on crime, whereas the IV results show statistically significant and negative effects. These findings support the argument that redistribution reduces crime, while also raising broader implications about the relationship between Japan’s well-known pattern of distributive politics and its comparatively low crime rate.