| The dissertation examines the conditions under which liberal democratic states have the capacity to adopt and enforce policies of coercive social regulation. Empirically there is wide variation in the capacity of states to regulate individuals coercively. Yet, scholars of the democratic state have tended to focus their analyses on its more "benign" interventions, mostly studying state capacities in policy fields of (re)distribution or economic regulation. This study addresses this gap by specifying conditions under which social regulatory state capacity is most likely to be strong. Specifically, and drawing on over 180 in-depth interviews, the study compares and explains the differing capacities of the German and American states to wield one of the most heavy-handed tools of social regulation: the deportation of immigrants.;Because coercive state intervention imposes severe costs upon its targets, the politics of coercive social regulation is characterized by high levels of political conflict. Yet, the dissertation argues, the logic of political contestation varies in fundamental ways across stages of the policy process. While at the level of legislation representatives face strong electoral pressures to regulate groups construed as threats to society, bureaucrats at the stage of implementation are more likely to encounter public demands hostile to coercion. Because it renders visible the human costs of coercion in individual cases, implementation lends itself to a humanitarian reframing of coercive policies that threatens to undermine the legitimacy of bureaucratic intervention. In consequence, reframing provides opportunities for targeted individuals and their advocates to appeal to their elected representatives to intervene in bureaucratic decision-making on their behalf. Coercive state capacity in the executive sphere, then, is contingent upon bureaucracies being insulated from the particularistic demands of representatives with incentives to provide constituency service. The degree of agency insulation, in turn, is determined by the institutional context within which elected officials and bureaucrats operate. |
