The Political Economy of Prosecution 1 Sanford C. Gordon Department of Politics New York University sanford.gordon@nyu.edu Gregory A. Huber Department of Political Science and ISPS Yale University gregory.huber@yale.edu Abstract We argue that contemporary advances in the field of political economy, particularly those concerning the subject of delegated authority, can provide a unifying framework for analyzing the behavior and political context of criminal prosecutors in the United States. This perspective, which considers a number of tradeoffs associated with mechanisms for compensating, reviewing, and constraining the discretion of public officials generally, is well-suited for studying these prosecutors, the vast majority of whom are elected but whose accountability is frequently called into question. Prosecutors serve in a variety of roles: as subordinates of voters (or other elected officials), superiors of subordinate prosecutors, collaborators in cooperative relationships with other officials in law enforcement and courtroom communities, and adversaries of defendants. Much of the behavior of prosecutors examined by scholars employing disparate disciplinary approaches may be explained with reference to (1) the extent of conflict between the prosecutor’s motives and those of other actors, and (2) the degree to which information is unevenly distributed among those actors. A political economy perspective is especially well- suited to integrate these features of the prosecutor’s environment into a coherent account. To illustrate the value of this unifying approach, we apply this perspective to three areas in the existing literature on prosecutors: plea bargaining, courtroom communities, and public corruption prosecution. 1 We thank Ashley Lott for excellent research assistance.