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theses

Since the 1990s, city councils in the United States have sanctioned order maintenance policing (OMP) practices through Quality of Life (QOL) ordinances. These laws, which proliferated during the punitive turn, empower police to serve as gatekeepers of physical and social order. To explain the stark ethnoracial disparities associated with OMP-related laws, scholars often use minority threat theory, which contends that as minority populations increase, politicians institute severe control responses to manage perceived social, political, and economic threats associated with those demographic changes (Blalock, 1957). While disparities persist today, questions remain about the durability of OMP practices and their impact on the policing of minorities. Since the 1990s, new policing trends have emerged, and it is unknown how these have affected the tone and scope of QOL ordinances. Further, tracing the influence of race in legislation over time is empirically challenging, since modern policy often invokes race tacitly, making it difficult to identify potential threat expressions in policies, especially through quantitative methods (Murakawa & Beckett, 2010).
This dissertation contributes to minority threat theory by using multiple methods to explore the presence and evolution of race-coded (RC) language in QOL ordinances in a nationally representative sample of cities (N=69), and evaluate the contextual factors that may influence observed trends in its use. Specifically, it assesses empirical support for minority threat explanations of implicit racial signaling in ordinances. I use Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) to measure the existence and nature of RC language at two time periods: 1.) the height of the punitive turn (1997-2000), and 2.) today (2018). Results from the QCA are employed to generate variables that describe the patterning of RC language. Those variables are subjected to bivariate analyses evaluating the suitability of minority threat explanations, and offering insights about additional city-level factors that may explain RC language use. The final phase of this dissertation uses case study analysis of three cities, drawing on interviews, ordinance language, and news coverage to inductively explore the mechanisms that undergird legislative action regarding minority threat expressions in local policy, and ends with the presentation of an initial theoretical model for understanding this process.

ETD_10077

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-m9hz-b037

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.