Lisa L. Miller

Scholars of mass incarceration in the United States often compare the extreme nature of U.S. imprisonment and other forms of state coercion to much less punitive forms in Europe. But it is not just harsh imprisonment, violent policing, and the death penalty that distinguish the U.S. from Europe. The United States also has relatively high rates of murder, distinctive political institutions, and a different origin story. This essay situates the U.S. within the Americas, home to eleven percent of the world’s population but more than a third of intentional homicides. State formation and state-building in the Americas emerged in a different time period and in the context of colonialism and slavery. The resultant political institutions are more fragmented and less effective at constraining violence in many forms than those in Europe. The essay offers a theoretical framework rooted in comparative political economy and historic institutionalism to shed light on the relationship between colonialism, state-building, and the monopoly of violence during key periods of state formation.

The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States. By Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024. 304p. - Volume 23 Issue 2

Scholarly work in American politics has yet to confront one of the nation’s starkest inequalities: lethal violence. The risk falls disproportionately on Black Americans, but much like poverty and inequality, lethal violence is a broadly American problem that African Americans are disproportionately likely to experience. The lack of attention to life-threatening violence has limited our understanding of race, criminal justice, and the nature of the American state. We draw on work in American political development and racial politics to extend a racialized state failure framework for understanding the United States as a high-violence society. Life-threatening violence declined dramatically in the nineteenth century in countries where state building involved the integrated consolidation of centralized violence monopolization and universal male suffrage. Such efforts faltered in the US, however, and violence thrived. We argue that this racialized state failure is the result of two reinforcing features of American politics: anti-transformative racial orders and institutional fragmentation. Fragmentation has long provided opportunities for anti-transformative racial orders to limit national intervention in violence control and enfranchisement, even during critical junctures when institutions are less determinate, and actions by decision makers are more likely to generate change. We illustrate the disruption of state building by racial orders, which minimized the state’s capacity to delegitimize violent self-help during two critical junctures in the US: Reconstruction and the crime wave of the mid- to late twentieth century. The resulting institutional configuration, which we refer to as forced localism, reinforces the jurisdictional authority of highly constrained state and local institutions in violence attenuation. The consequence is exceptionally high rates of serious violence and a harsh and exclusionary criminal justice system, with Black Americans exceptionally vulnerable to both.

Conventional accounts of the U.S. constitution laud its checks and balances for diffusing power across many venues, limiting the potential for government oppression, and protecting political minorities. I refer to this as constitutional folk wisdom and contrast it with an American political economy approach of veto exceptionalism to better understand how the U.S. constitution shapes, and is shaped, by power relations. This analysis illustrates the volume and scope of veto exceptionalism and its implication for democratic participation and accountability, contrasts it with the virtues championed by the folk wisdom, and suggests how veto exceptionalism can help explain political outcomes and processes in American politics. I argue that the folk wisdom is not only inaccurate as a description of how power functions in the American “checks and balances” system; it is cultivated and utilized most frequently by powerful economic and racial actors that benefit from the anti-democratic and elitist features of the U.S. constitutional system.

The US Senate is unique in the United States and rare internationally for its total disregard of population differences among its representational units. To analyze malapportionment’s policy impact, we devised a hypothetical reapportionment scheme that more closely approximates state population but remains favorable to small states. We developed a formula to reweight senators’ roll-call votes to reflect better state population differences. We recalculated 804 key US Senate votes between 1961 and 2019 and found that state equality in the Senate systematically biases policy outcomes toward Republican preferences.

How well do we understand the political moment in which we find ourselves in the wake of the Trump presidency? The United States has long failed to keep up with its democratic peers on a wide range of social outcomes but the struggle to keep a pandemic at bay, coupled with increases in social violence and new uprisings over state violence have exposed the failures of the American state in a stark manner. While research on political attitudes continues to offer crucial insights into what Americans want from government and how race, class, and gender are formative dimensions of public opinion, we know considerably less about how these attitudes intersect with the highly fragmented and decentralized nature of U.S. political institutions. In this essay, I offer a framework for understanding our current moment through the lens of racialized anti-statism and state failure. I focus on the intersection of two reinforcing and overlapping features of the U.S. political system: the highly fragmented, veto-laden structure of American politics and the persistence of anti-egalitarian movements. By situating our analysis at this intersection, we observe the convergence of racial and economic power in an anti-statist alliance that undermines American state-building, even when large majorities of Americans favor it.

This title was first published in 2001. This book explores the complex and often striking differences between national and local perspectives, particularly those of racial minorities, on crime prevention and the role that community residents should play in prevention programmes.