The final decades of the twentieth century have been marked by the progressive expansion of the socially coercive state in the advanced industrialized world. Beginning in the 1980s and extending into the new millennium, liberal democracies faced public demands for hard-edged social regulation in areas such as migration control, criminal justice, and homeland security. In response, elected legislatures enacted far-reaching measures of social control across a range of policy fields and funded the rapid growth of coercive bureaucracies.

To illustrate this point, from 1991 to 2001 the budgets of both the German Federal Border Police and the Canadian immigration service more than doubled, whereas the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's budget nearly quadrupled. Even more dramatically, immigration spending in Britain in the same period underwent a more than sixfold increase. Significantly, these law enforcement initiatives have not been limited to the regulation of migration. In the area of drug control, the budget of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration more than tripled between 1985 and 2002. In the field of criminal justice more generally, U.S. government spending on the federal prison system more than quadrupled between 1985 and 2002. Similarly, in Canada, the corrections and rehabilitation services budget doubled from 1989 to 2002.

In North America, governments simultaneously enacted sweeping administrative reforms.