The Color of State Governance: Examining the Primacy of Race in Social Welfare and Criminal Justice Spending Across Multiple Levels of Government

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.