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Abstract
Violence is believed to be a method of nonconventional political participation or at least socio-political interest articulation which is employed by the alienated, the disadvantaged, and the deprived in order to draw a favorable governmental policy response. Therefore, the process of governmental policy response to violence has very important political meaning in terms of the power struggle between the advantaged and the disadvantaged and in terms of the democratic governmental responsiveness.
In the American experience, the black riots and the rapid rise in crime rates during the 1960s and 1970s are the most prominent types of violence which required a governmental policy response. In this study, considering that violence is a main factor influencing policy decision making, I focused on policy effects of the violence rather than on the phenomena of violence itself.
Quantitative analyses were performed on data for 153 American cities with populations of over 100,000. To test my hypotheses, I employed multiple regression using a cross-sectional design and employed a typology in terms of "expenditure/non-expenditure" and "reconstructive/repressive/service-distributive" in order to produce empirically valid results from the analyses.
According to my analyses, violence had a significant impact on expenditure and non-expenditure policies. Violence also influenced the reconstructive, repressive, and service-distributive policies of municipal governments. Cities with riots and a high crime rate tended toward more reconstructive, repressive, and service distributive expenditures when compared to cities which did not experience riots and a high crime rate.
When we regard violence as a political expression of the disadvantaged, the tactic of violence as a method of expression has successfully achieved their goal by inducing favorable expenditure and non-expenditure policy responses. When we regard the policy against violence as the result of a democratic government's response, governments responded pretty well to various articulations of political interests. That is, cities which had riots and high crime rates actually did respond to various demands by appropriate expenditure and non-expenditure policies.
