‘The constitution of political membership’: Punishment, political membership, and the Italian case
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Author | Zelia Gallo |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617724825 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
724825TCR0010.1177/1362480617724825Theoretical CriminologyGallo
research-article2017
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2017, Vol. 21(4) 458 –477
‘The constitution of political
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617724825
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political membership, and
the Italian case
Zelia Gallo
King’s College London, UK
Abstract
The article argues that punishment will vary depending on how political membership is
constituted in different polities. This has significant implications for arguments that link
contemporary western punitiveness to ‘anti-politics’, understood here as a degradation
of political membership. The article argues that the spread of ‘anti-politics’ and its penal
implications will depend on how political membership is constituted in different polities
and in their ‘State’. It reaches this conclusion by exploring the way in which ‘the State’
appears in the literature on politics and punishment, and by adopting a re-worked
definition of ‘the State’. The Italian case study is then used to demonstrate both the
link between punishment and political membership, and the need to contextualize our
analyses of ‘anti-politics’ and punitiveness.
Keywords
Anti-politics, Italy, political membership, punishment, state theory
Introduction: Political membership and ‘the State’
In this article I argue that punishment and political membership are intimately connected.
This connection emerges from a study of the role that different conceptions of ‘the State’
play in analyses of contemporary western punishment, particularly the literature that
Corresponding author:
Zelia Gallo, Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: zelia.gallo@kcl.ac.uk
Gallo
459
investigates the link between punishment and politics (Barker, 2009; Garland, 2001;
Lacey, 2008; Loader, 2008; Miller, 2013, 2016; Ramsay, 2012).
To make this argument, I operationalize the key concepts ‘the State’ and ‘political
membership’, and apply them to analyses that have linked punitiveness to ‘anti-politics’
(Loader, 2008)—a degradation of democratic politics and an expression of weakened
state sovereignty (Ramsay, 2012). ‘Anti-politics’ is of interest insofar as it raises con-
cerns both for democratic politics and for democratic punishment. ‘The State’ in such
narratives is the Leviathan (Hobbes, 2008), and I argue against such a monolithic vision
of ‘the State’, by showing that in the politics and punishment literature ‘the State’ appears
at two additional levels: institutions and citizens. ‘The State’ also needs to be understood
as relational (Barker, 2009: 31): it is never just the personified sovereign, but is simulta-
neously its institutions, its citizens, and their interrelations.
This reconfiguration of ‘the State’ has implications for the way in which we think
about punishment: if we expand our notion of ‘the State’, we are automatically forced
to ask exactly how citizens inhabit their polity, and how this comes to shape the
demands they do or do not make of the sovereign State, including putative demands
for law and order. Key to this redefinition of ‘the State’ is the issue of political mem-
bership, understood as the sovereign State’s conception of its citizens; the available
routes for citizens to contribute to the running of the State; and citizens’ conception
of their own belonging. Together these dimensions speak of ‘the constitution of politi-
cal membership’: the manner in which political membership is constructed and articu-
lated in any given polity. I apply this notion to claims concerning punishment and
‘anti-politics’. I complicate our understanding of political membership by asking
whether ‘the constitution’, and thus the ‘dereliction’, of political membership have
been equivalent across polities. This reveals the limits and comparative applicability
of the ‘anti-politics of crime’.
The article’s conceptualization of ‘the State’ and political membership derives
from my reading of the Italian case study, a case that challenges contemporary penal
analyses (Gallo, 2015; Menichelli, 2015). At the penal level, for example, Italy dis-
plays both punitiveness and moderation (Gallo, 2015: 600–609). Consequently this
‘dual penality’ is ill suited to accounts that presume either increasing western puni-
tiveness (Garland, 2001; Wacquant, 2009) or penal stability (Lacey, 2008). The Italian
State also complicates explanations of contemporary punitiveness that call upon ‘the
State’ as sovereign. The Italian State is ‘contested’ (Agnew, 2002: 58; Gallo, 2015:
610) or even ‘absent’ (Cassese, 2011), terms that indicate a historical tension between
sovereign and citizens, which has an impact on the use and distribution of punishment
(Gallo, 2015), and is manifest in the existence of informal institutions and informal
social controls.
Consequently, Italy is a useful case study against which to test the comparative pur-
chase of analyses on political decline and rising punitiveness. The comparison with Italy
emphasizes that penal theories need to take account of differences in the construction of
political membership across polities, as these differences have consequences for punish-
ment. We can neither assume ‘anti-politics’ have taken equal hold across western poli-
ties, nor that they inevitably produce a demand for more law and more punishment
(Loader, 2008: 405).
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Theoretical Criminology 21(4)
The article proceeds in six sections: section one provides a brief explanation of the
link between punishment and political membership as it features in existing literature.
Section two analyses ‘anti-politics’ in terms of the decline of political membership and
its penal implications. Section three unearths the assumptions present in such narratives,
both in terms of how ‘the State’ is understood, and in terms of the spread of ‘anti-poli-
tics’. Section four tests the assumptions on ‘the State’ by tracing how the latter appears
in the politics and punishment literature; it concludes by arguing that we need to look
more closely at the constitution of political membership across contexts. Sections five
and six test this contextual applicability in Italy: first by looking at the nature of Italian
penality and State (section five) and then by interrogating whether Italy can be described
as a society dominated by law and order (section six).
Punishment and political membership
In the literature on politics and punishment, the relationship between punishment and
political membership has been conceptualized as going in two different, interconnected,
directions. On the one hand, punishment is a means with which to understand political
membership: we investigate punishment within particular polities to understand how it
contributes to, and constructs, membership. Punishment ‘sorts and stratifies’ among
citizens (Barker, 2009: 13; Stumpf, 2006), in the process defining the ‘insiders’ and
‘outsiders’ (Lacey, 2008: 6) within our political communities: punishment differentiates
among citizens.
By analysing punishment we can further identify which transgressions of the com-
munity’s rules set individuals outside it, and track the effects of penal exclusion on
offenders’ future reintegration into society (Loader and Sparks, 2014: 117; Stumpf, 2006:
405–406). Studies that have analysed the evolution of contemporary western punishment
during the 20th and 21st centuries (for example Garland, 2001), can thus be interpreted
as studies of the instrumental role that punishment plays in shaping the relationship
between State and citizens.
However, the link between punishment and political membership also goes in the
opposite direction. The focus here is on political membership, and its construction, as an
indicator of punishment (Aas, 2014: 526). This point is persuasively made by compara-
tive penal analyses, in particular those that have focused on political, institutional, and
political economic differences across polities (Barker, 2009: 25; Cavadino and Dignan,
2006; Lacey, 2008), and how they relate to penal divergence. This literature is arguing
that differently constituted political communities punish differently. Institutions, political
economy, welfare support, can then be seen as mechanisms through which membership
is constituted, that is, mechanisms through which the relationship between ‘the State’
and its citizens is constructed, that also play out in the penal realm. The article is con-
cerned with this second relationship.
Throughout the article ‘citizens’ should be understood as legal citizens. Legal citizens
possess a panoply of rights that are otherwise denied to migrants, or granted to them only
in dilute forms. This includes voting rights, but also the procedural safeguards inherent
in criminal law (Zedner, 2013), which may not extend to migrants, thus contributing to
their differential experience of punishment (Aas, 2014; Barker, 2013).1
Gallo
461
Anti-politics and punishment—problems of membership
The link between punishment and political membership is directly called into question by
the ‘anti-politics of crime’, a notion developed by Ian Loader (2008) in his review of
Richard Ericson’s (2007) and Jonathan Simon’s (2007) work. According to Loader,
today’s penality—with the predominance of crime and punishment and a harshening of
penal practices—has been...
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