A time series factor analysis of integrative and coercive social control

Abstract

Most research, drawing on the conflict perspective of social control, examines the causal influence of integrative control (welfare, racial residential segregation) on coercive control (police resources, incarceration). Unfortunately, the results from these studies tend to be inconsistent; often varying across eras, research designs, model specifications, and outcome variables. The present investigation, which is also rooted in conflict theory, attempts to make sense of these disparate findings. Toward this end, we use factor analytic, time series procedures to determine whether or not there is a single underlying dimension of macro-social control (the Quinney hypothesis) or if there are two dimensions of macro-social control (Blauner–Spitzer hypothesis). In brief, the results from the factor analyses of annual, national-level measures of welfare recipients, military personnel, psychiatric hospital patients, policing expenditures, and imprisonment fail to confirm either hypothesis concerning the interrelationships among differing mechanisms of macro-social control.

Keywords:

• macro-social control
• conflict theory
• factor analysis
• time series

Notes

1. An anonymous reviewer notes that while Blauner (1969, 1972) and Spitzer (1975) both hypothesize that increases in the level of social threat give rise to integrative and coercive mechanisms of social control, their theoretical writings focus on differing sources of social threat. Whereas Blauner (1969, 1972) is primarily concerned with social threat that emerges from interracial conflict between whites and blacks, Spitzer (1975) is more interested in social threat that emerges from the conflict between the owners of the means of production and surplus labor. We agree with the reviewer's observations about the differences between Blauner and Spitzer regarding the social sources of intergroup threat. However, our research is primarily concerned with a different matter. Specifically, the present investigation focuses on a point of contention among conflict theorists concerning the dimensionality of macro-social control. Blauner and Spitzer assert that there are two, empirically discernible forms of macro-social control. Quinney maintains that there is only one. An analysis of the relative impact of racial and economic sources of social threat on macro-social control (the implicit concern of the reviewer), though worthy of further study, is beyond the scope of the current inquiry.

2. We conducted several sensitivity analyses, removing the two shortest time series (the police expenditure and the psychiatric patient series), one at time and simultaneously, to see if increasing the number of usable observations would affect the factor solutions. All three analyses produced results very similar to those reported in Table 1.