The office of county sheriff is one of the more peculiar American political institutions: sheriffs are elected law enforcement agents who exercise broad discretion in the use of their powers. This unusual arrangement gives rise to the central contradiction at the heart of Emily Farris and Mirya Holman’s authoritative new account of the office. On one hand, sheriffs often publicly frame their authority as flowing directly from “the people who elect him/her into office” (2). At the extreme end of the spectrum, the “constitutional sheriffs” movement has cited local democratic legitimacy to justify defying federal mandates on civil rights, COVID restrictions, and gun control. And yet, the office consistently falls short of basic standards of democratic accountability. Sheriffs operate in an exceptionally low-turnout, low-information, and uncompetitive electoral setting, and they are empowered to keep it that way: restrictions on candidate entry often limit the pool of potential challengers to officers working under the sheriff’s supervision, allowing incumbents to deter electoral threats until they are ready to hand-pick their successors.

This contradiction motivates Farris and Holman’s core research question: how do sheriffs wield their immense discretionary powers, and whose interests are represented in those choices? The