Chapter 4 traces the development of the Police of Buenos Aires Province since Argentina’s transition to democracy and accounts for its institutional persistence in the face of extensive extralegal violence and predation of the citizenry. Despite the integral role of police in the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, the transition to democracy in 1983 did not entail efforts to reform the country’s police institutions in accordance with democratic principles, as occurred with the military. As crime rates and societal demands for improved security increased, structural police reform was not on the agenda, and countless short-term efforts to root out corruption largely floundered. While other provincial institutions, such as the judiciary, underwent structural reform, the police strategically used its control over coercion to raise the cost to politicians of constraining police authority. The resulting accommodation between police and politicians largely kept police reform off the public agenda and allowed the provincial police to thwart external accountability efforts. I demonstrate that societal demands regarding policing and security were largely fragmented and often contradictory, such that politicians saw little electoral incentive to address police violence, corruption, and poor performance.

Because the cases of Buenos Aires Province and Colombia eventually resulted in ambitious structural police reforms, Chapter 7 presents a detailed sequential analysis of the events that brought about reform in each instance, leveraging changes over time in societal preferences and the strength of the political opposition. The sequential analyses presented in this chapter elucidate the factors that shape politicians’ incentives when choosing between continuity and reform, demonstrating how those incentives changed in response to short-term shifts in societal preferences and political competition. The accounts of Buenos Aires Province and Colombia complement one another well, demonstrating that neither of these conditions is sufficient to bring about reform on its own. In each case, we observe an explicit decision by the executive to maintain the status quo when faced with the convergence of societal preferences (Buenos Aires Province) or a robust political opposition (Colombia) on its own. After both conditions were present, however, the two executives chose to enact comprehensive structural reforms just months after opting for the status quo. By analyzing politicians’ choices before and after the joint occurrence of these conditions, we obtain a greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying institutional persistence and change among police forces.