Georg Wenzelburger, The Partisan Politics of Law and Order
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Author | Johanna Nickels |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474521989795 |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
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Sanja Milivojevic
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Email: S.Milivojevic@latrobe.edu.au
Georg Wenzelburger, The Partisan Politics of Law and Order, Oxford
University Press: New York, 2020; 254pp.: ISBN 9780190920487,
£32.99 (hbk)
Existing comparative punishment and society literature seems to agree on a multifactor-
ial understanding of the interrelationship of punishment and society, which draws upon
e.g. features of political institutions, characteristics of welfare states, further socio-
economic factors or the media. Yet, the specific role and interplay of these factors
are still strongly contested (for an overview see e.g. Simon and Sparks, 2012). In
putting the dynamics of partisan politics center stage, Wenzelburger’sThe Partisan
Politics of Law and Order offers a refreshingly new perspective on these debates.
Drawing on state-of-the-art concepts of public policy analysis and party competition,
Wenzelburger theorizes and empirically tests the influence of partisan politics on the
evolution of law and order policies throughout the last 25 years in 20 Western democ-
racies. While the concept of law and order may be broader than mere punishment, the
book addresses at least two important gaps in comparative punishment and society
research. First, The Partisan Politics of Law and Order leaves the macro-level as the
traditional perspective for comparative research and zooms in to compare the specific
interplay of political actors and the resulting dynamics within the institutional frame-
work. And second, Wenzelburger’s empirical analysis is based on new data that goes
beyond the aggregate indicator of imprisonment rates and includes comparative
in-depth case studies of France, Germany, the UK and Sweden; thus, supplementing
the manifold studies on the US.
292 Punishment & Society 24(2)
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