#  Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America 

 



   ![Book cover, confrontation between police and protesters](/sites/g/files/omnuum4221/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-09/Screenshot%202025-09-10%20at%2010.16.30%E2%80%AFAM.png?itok=9V9HEHH9) 

 

*Authoritarian Police in Democracy* explores the persistence of police institutions as authoritarian enclaves in democracies. As democratic institutions flourished throughout Latin America, police forces sustained patterns of authoritarian coercion – serving the interests of political leaders, outside the bounds of the rule of law, and with negligible external accountability.

The book argues that authoritarian coercive institutions persist under democracy, not because politicians are unresponsive to societal demands for improved security, but rather because societal contestation over the distribution of protection and repression renders police reform electorally disadvantageous. Authoritarian coercion persists when societal preferences over policing are fragmented along social cleavages such as race and class, because politicians perceive uncertain electoral gain in enacting police reform, and a certain risk of alienating a powerful bureaucracy. Reform to promote democratic coercion becomes likely when politicians observe the convergence of societal preferences and face a robust political opposition. These factors act as an electoral counterweight to the police’s structural power.

Through comparative analysis of continuity and reform in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, *Authoritarian Police in Democracy* demonstrates that, far from constituting a failure of democratic processes, politicians’ decisions to maintain the status quo of authoritarian coercion or to undertake reform both result from a strictly democratic political logic.

*Authoritarian Police in Democracy* received the Gregory Luebbert Prize for Best Book in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association (2022), as well as the Donna Lee Van Cott Award for Best Book on Latin American Politics and Institutions from the Latin American Studies Association (2022).

[Click here for more information on my book](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/authoritarian-police-in-democracy/99C378132A59BAC9C0E2BE7AF693DCAF).