This is a study of social threat and social control, examining the effects of threats such as crime and economic problems on the growth or decline of bureaucracies whose public mission is to deal with them. The investigator will assemble a data set with city as the unit of analysis, drawing upon official statistics over the span 1960-1990, to allow him to test theoretical propositions drawn from conflict theory. Three kinds of threat will be studied (criminal, racial, economic), along with several measures of the activity of control bureaucracies (police size, imprisonment rates, mental hospital admissions, welfare payments). This project will integrate several fields and contribute to criminology, race relations, economics of social problems, and policy studies. It will increase our understanding of the processes of social conflict that shape public institutions and their response to perceived threats.
