Why globalisation doesn't spell convergence: models of institutional variation and the comparative political economy of punishment

Abstract

[W]e are confronted with results in comparative political economy which undermine the assumptions of mainstream comparative law about ‘convergence’ and ‘functional equivalence’… Against all expectations that globalization of the markets and computerization of the economy will lead to a convergence of legal regimes and to a functional equivalence of legal norms in responding to their identical problems, the opposite has turned out to be the case. Against all talk of ‘regulatory competition’ which is supposed to wipe out institutional differences, legal regimes under advanced capitalism have not converged. Teubner 2001: 433 In the last decade, there has been a welcome revival of criminal justice scholarship which engages with the macro-level political–economic forces which are shaping criminal justice policy in western democracies. Many of these accounts are rooted in the global economic changes which began in the 1970s – recession, the contraction or even collapse of manufacturing industries, the growth of unemployment and the creation of a large sector of people either long-term unemployed or employed in insecure forms of work. These changes, it is argued, have eroded the consensus which sustained post-war penal welfarism. As significantly rising recorded crime across Western countries gradually produced a situation in which the experience of criminal victimisation, and of managing the risk and fear of crime, became normal features of everyday life for the economically secure, crime became an increasingly politicised issue, generating a ‘penal populism’ which brought in its wake a combination of repressive and managerial criminal justice strategies.