Comparative Criminal Politics
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The topics of internal security and crime prevention are omnipresent in political debates, but comparatively rare in political science research. In this seminar, we develop a comparative view of the design of criminal policy and penal systems in different democracies and their transformation in late modernity. We draw on prominent theories on the “punitive turn,” punitive populism, and the political economy of punishment from the traditional criminological literature, but also include non-Western and decolonial perspectives. In addition, we address the question of how criminal policy can be measured comparatively and what the advantages and disadvantages of different measurement approaches are. The learning objective of the seminar is for students to understand the basic principles of criminal policy design, weigh up different theories to explain it, and develop their own approaches to comparative analysis.
