Why Globalisation Doesn’t Spell Convergence: Models of Institutional Variation and the Comparative Political Economy of Punishment

In A Crawford (ed), International and Comparative Criminal Justice and Urban Governance (CUP 2011) 214-250

Oxford Legal Studies Research Paper No. 49/2012

40 Pages Posted: 16 Aug 2012 Last revised: 3 Sep 2012

See all articles by Nicola Lacey

Nicola Lacey

London School of Economics - Law School

Date Written: 2011

Abstract

This paper argues that contemporary patterns of punishment can only be fully understood through comparative analysis, and makes in particular a case for a political – economic approach based on the analysis of comparative institutional advantage of differently structured systems. This comparative advantage explains why, notwithstanding a measure of globalization and policy transfer in criminal justice, longstanding differences in the penal practices of different countries persist. The paper also examines the distrust of model-building in contemporary social theories of punishment, acknowledging that this distrust proceeds from some legitimate and eminently understandable concerns: but arguing that it is nonetheless obstructive to the capacity of comparative research to achieve its full explanatory potential. The second part of the paper examines the objections to typology or model-building in penal theory by drawing on the case studies of New Zealand and the USA – countries which on the face of it present difficulties for the model sketched in The Prisoners’ Dilemma (2008). It argues that the objections to model-building may be more readily overcome than is usually recognized; and that the apparently different enterprises of model-building or theoretical generalization on the one hand and detailed empirical research on the other are intimately linked in a number of ways. By moving between these complementary methods, moving back and forth between model and data, it is possible to revise and refine models in the light of further findings. And this in turn will open up new and fruitful fields of local empirical inquiry for criminologists and others. .

Keywords: globalization, convergence, comparative political economy, punishment models, institutions, New Zealand, United States

Suggested Citation

Lacey, Nicola, Why Globalisation Doesn’t Spell Convergence: Models of Institutional Variation and the Comparative Political Economy of Punishment (2011). In A Crawford (ed), International and Comparative Criminal Justice and Urban Governance (CUP 2011) 214-250, Oxford Legal Studies Research Paper No. 49/2012, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2126555 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2126555

Nicola Lacey (Contact Author)

London School of Economics - Law School ( email )

Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom

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