The politics of law and order

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Georg Wenzelburger
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 240630516

The research project aims at analyzing the politics of law and order in a comparative perspective using the theories and methods of comparative public policy research. The project starts from the criminological literature and supplements these approaches with a genuine public-policy-analysis emphasizing the impact of political institutions and parties on law and order policy-making. Following this goal, the project aims 1.) at investigating the differences and commonalities of law and order policies between nation-states as well as their development over time and 2.) at explaining the cross-sectional and temporal variance using a political-institutional model of public policy-making. The research design of the project is based on three parts. In a first step, the analysis is based on a macro-quantitative analysis of aggregate data on law and order policies, such as spending, imprisonment etc. The goal of this first step is to identify patterns in the data and to explore what explanatory variables may influence law and order policies. In a second step, the analysis moves on to scrutinize law and order policy-making in four countries, namely Germany, the UK, France and Sweden. Based on meticulous process tracing, the analysis aims at identifying causal mechanisms that can explain law and order policies in these countries. Finally, in a third step, the project focusses on the micro-level and investigates how differences in fear of crime in the Western industrialized countries can be explained. It moves beyond the existing studies as it integrates political macro-variables in these multi-level-analyses. The focus of the research project is on Western industrialized countries and the period between 1990 and 2010 as the punitive turn towards harsher law and order policies should be most visible during this time. The Fortsetzungsantrag has the aim to carefully finish the initial work program of the research project. Whereas the first part (macro-quantitative analysis) has already been successfully completed, the case studies are finished at around 70 percent. Due to the change of university of the principal investigator and the longer time spent on the case studies (due to the elite interviews) the project has been delayed somewhat. Therefore, the Fortsetzungsantrag asks for an additional financing for nine months.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants