Is Justice Blind? Evidence from Federal Corruption Convictions

Are federal prosecutors influenced by partisan political concerns? We examine this question by analyzing forty years of federal corruption convictions at the state and federal district levels. Our key finding is that state-level corruption convictions fall by 8% in years when a state’s governor is of the same party as the U.S. president, a measure of state-federal political alignment. This effect is more precisely estimated for Republican than Democratic administrations. Our findings are robust to controls for state and national political environments, presidential fixed effects, election cycles, party tenure in the executive branch, and the changes in Honest Services law. In addition, we conduct a placebo test, finding that state-federal political alignment does not affect the total number of federal criminal convictions. Finally, we find no evidence that local-federal political alignment matters for corruption convictions at the district level. Our results are consistent with a significant level of partisan prosecutorial bias on the part of U.S. Attorneys