The Color of State Governance
Examining the Primacy of Race in Social Welfare and Criminal Justice Spending Across Multiple Levels of Government
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2292248 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D M Ramey (0000-0001-7812-7966, Pennsylvania State University), Brittany N Freelin (0000-0001-5381-0101, Randolph–Macon College), Trent Steidley (0000-0002-5139-6557, independent scholar) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 96 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 5-46 |
| Publication date | 2025-03-06 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociological Inquiry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-0245 • E-ISSN: 1475-682X |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/soin.70002 |
| OpenAlex | W4408249363 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 87 |
Over the past 50 years, scholars have documented a retrenchment of social welfare systems alongside an expansion of criminal justice systems across the United States. Yet, research rarely examines whether these trends can be explained by similar underlying processes. Likewise, scholars rarely consider the structure of American federalism when studying state governance is exercised across state, county, and city governments. In this paper, we merge data on state, county, and city social welfare and criminal justice spending data from the Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances (ASG) with data from multiple sources and employ seemingly unrelated regression models to examine changes in social welfare and criminal justice spending across a period of increasing state punitiveness. Specifically, we examine whether state, county, and city Black populations are associated with social welfare or criminal justice spending across multiple levels of government between 1982 and 2020. Our findings demonstrate that racial composition is associated with spending in ways that are consistent with minority threat and similar narratives surrounding state governance. Furthermore, this relationship persists across United States, counties, and cities, though to different degrees across these levels of governance, while the influence of political and economic factors is less consistent
Corporate governance · Criminal justice · Criminology · Economic Justice · Economics · Government (linguistics · Political science · Politics · Public economics · Race (biology · Social Welfare · Sociology · State (computer science · Welfare · Welfare state · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law
Punishment and welfare
The undeserving poor
Regulating the poor
Structural Racism In Historical And Modern US Health Care Policy
Racism and Health
An Efficient Method of Estimating Seemingly Unrelated Regressions and Tests for Aggregation Bias
Criminality and legal order
Toward a Theory of Minority Group Relations
Making Crime Pay
Social Threat and Social Control
Privileged Places
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime
Disciplining the Poor
Black Reconstruction in America
Punishment and Modern Society
Governing Through Police? Housing Market Reliance, Welfare Retrenchment, and Police Budgeting in an Era of Declining Crime
Racialized Preferences in Context
Whose Need Matters
Race, Hyper‐Incarceration, and US Poverty Policy in Historic Perspective
Governing Social Marginality
The Legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act
"Building Their Readiness For Economic "Freedom
Do in-kind grants stick? The department of defense 1033 program and local government spending
Policing Urban America
Is Welfare Really about Social Control
The Discovery of Hyperkinesis
Crime and Punishment
Race, Racial Threat, and Sentencing of Habitual Offenders
Contextual Disparities in Guidelines Departures
Minority Threat and Police Strength From 1980 to 2000
Minority Threat and Police Brutality
Modeling the Effects of Racial Threat on Punitive and Restorative School Discipline Practices
Scope and Conceptual Issues in Testing the Race–crime Invariance Thesis
The New Jim Crow
Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position
How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution
The Rise of State Preemption Laws in Response to Local Policy Innovation
Race and the War on Crime
The Politics of Disgust
State Preemption of Local Authority
Cities in American Federalism
Racial Diversity and Public Policy in the States
State Politics, Race, and “Welfare” as a Funding Stream
The Conditional Effect of Violence as a Political Tactic
The Race to Punish in American Schools
Perceptions of Racial Group Competition
How White Attitudes Vary with the Racial Composition of Local Populations
Who Controls Criminal Law? Racial Threat and the Adoption of State Sentencing Law, 1975 to 2012
State Tanf Spending
Citizens and Paupers
The Political Economy of Imprisonment in Affluent Western Democracies, 1960-1990
The Economics of Policing and Public Safety
Medicine as an Institution of Social Control
"Race Coding" and White Opposition to Welfare
Group Threat and Social Control
Racial Disparities in Health Status and Access to Healthcare
From Max Weber
Law, Social Standing and Racial Disparities in Imprisonment
Punishment, Religion, and the Shrinking Welfare State for the Very Poor in the United States, 1970-2010
Medicalization and Social Control
Racial Context and Police Force Size
Ballot Manipulation and the 'Menace of Negro Domination
Welfare and the Rise in Female-Headed Families
Racial Insurgency, The State, and Welfare Expansion
Racial Insurgency, the State, and Welfare Expansion
Interracial Conflict and Interracial Homicide
Identifying the Undeserving Poor
Urine or You're Out
Race and the underdevelopment of the American welfare state
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |