Comparative political economy and penal policy

Despite some notable exceptions (e.g., Sozzo, Reference Sozzo2021; Lacey et al., Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018; Lappi-Seppälä, Reference Lappi-Seppälä2011), quantitatively informed macro-comparative analysis of penal policy remains relatively rare. Comparative criminology more commonly uses case-driven small-n comparisons (e.g., Crewe et al., Reference Crewe, Ievins, Larmour, Laursen, Mjåland and Schliehe2022) or theoretical generalisations based on trends in a particular national context (e.g., Duxbury, Reference Duxbury2021). Such studies offer rich insights into individual systems, but Nelken and Hamilton (Reference Nelken and Hamilton2022) argue conclusions from these approaches may not generalise across a wider sample. Historically, limited availability of robust and meaningful cross-national data hampered macro-level comparisons of criminal justice policy, but advances in data and methods have now removed some of these barriers (Nelken, Reference Nelken2010; Tubex, Reference Tubex, Beyens, Christiaens, Claes, De Ridder, Tournel and Tubex2013).

Despite facing similar limitations, scholars in other fields of applied policy analysis have persisted with broad quantitative macro-comparative analyses. They have often hedged the risks arising from limited datasets by rooting their analysis in established comparative political economy frameworks that aid contextualisation and interpretation of data. Nunn and Tepe (Reference Nunn and Tepe2022) note growing interest in political economy among criminologists; several high-profile theories of penal policy have highlighted aspects of political economy, including Cavadino and Dignan’s (Reference Cavadino and Dignan2006) work linking criminal justice with welfare regimes and Wacquant’s (Reference Wacquant2009) account of punitiveness as a central feature of neoliberal statecraft.

Recent macro-comparative analyses of criminal justice policy (e.g., Cavadino and Dignan, Reference Cavadino and Dignan2006, Reference Cavadino and Dignan2012, Reference Cavadino and Dignan2013; Crawford, Reference Crawford2011; Díez-Ripollés, Reference Díez-Ripollés2013; Lacey, Reference Lacey2008, Reference Lacey2010, Reference Lacey2012; McAra, Reference McAra and Crawford2011; Nelken, Reference Nelken2010; Tubex, Reference Tubex, Beyens, Christiaens, Claes, De Ridder, Tournel and Tubex2013) have produced a great deal of fruitful discussion, with key studies underlining the value of a political economy approach. Within this body of work, Lacey et al. (Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018) offer arguably the most sophisticated attempt to apply comparative political economy theory. They identify multiple “explanatory paradigms of penal policy” and conclude the “comparative political economy model, with its close attention to institutional particularities and their concrete shaping of incentives, provides the most promising framework in terms of bringing these insights together” (Lacey et al., Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018: 212). More specifically, they strongly suggest that different VoCs are likely to be key in explaining cross-national variations in punitiveness.

The VoC perspective occupies a prominent place in comparative political economy (e.g., Hall and Soskice’s (Reference Hall and Soskice2001) foundational text). At its core is the distinction between liberal market economies (LMEs), where economic coordination takes place primarily through market mechanisms, and coordinated market economies (CMEs), where non-market modes of coordination are more prominent. Hall and Soskice (Reference Hall and Soskice2001) argued that different modes of coordination in LMEs and CMEsFootnote ¹ reflect different institutional arrangements that shape the strategic interactions of firms with other political and economic actors, particularly with respect to industrial relations, employee relations, vocational training and education, inter-firm relations, and governance. As such, VoC represents an actor-centred political economy approach in which the strategic interaction of firms within their institutional context is seen as key in understanding the development of distinctive models of capitalism.

Although VoC’s relevance to criminal justice may seem limited at first sight, it is expansive in orientation, considering how variations in economic, social, and political institutions shape different VoC. Crucially, it postulates that institutional complementarities exist in different spheres of political economy, including social policies that constitute differences between LMEs and CMEs. Indeed, in Hall and Soskice’s (Reference Hall and Soskice2001) foundational text, Estevez-Abe et al. (Reference Estevez-Abe, Iversen, Soskice, Hall and Soskice2001) argued different welfare production regimes, featuring varying levels of employment, unemployment, and wage protections, map on to each VoC. This raises the question of whether and how variations in punitiveness might be understood as an additional dimension of institutional complementarity. Lacey et al. (Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018) argue that CME systems are more likely to encourage less punitive and more rehabilitative penal approaches compared to LMEs. However, while they illustrate their theory with a detailed case study of the United States, they stop short of developing and operationalising a systematic cross-national comparison to test their argument. Instead, prompting our own investigation, they lay down a future research agenda, arguing “The institutional structures and modus operandi of political-economic systems – labo[u]r markets, political systems, welfare states – are obvious places to look” (Lacey et al., Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018: 205) and conclude “There remains much detailed empirical work to be done to test out the hypotheses emerging from this work” (Lacey et al., Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018: 212).

Operationalisation challenges: distilling theory

Lacey et al. (Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018) provide numerous illustrations supporting their thesis that VoC is a missing link in debates about cross-national variations in punitiveness. However, undertaking the detailed empirical work they prompt is not a straightforward task because the broad themes they articulate are not easily operationalised in an empirically rooted cross-national analysis. Moreover, even if they had defined a specific set of institutional factors, data limitations present a challenge for anyone seeking cross-national measures suitable for empirical study. As a first step towards operationalising Lacey et al.’s (Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018) thesis, we begin by drawing out five key themes from their paper, focusing in particular on those that also feature prominently in other key comparative political economy and punitiveness studies.

Operationalisation challenges: complex causality

The list above is a broad, but not exhaustive, summary of themes in key studies, hinting at a challenge any analysis of political economy and penal policy needs to confront: the expansive nature of relevant theoretical contributions. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that studies commonly argue that causal pathways are complex, with outcomes contingent on interactions between multiple institutions. Quantitative comparative methods can soon reach their limits when exploring theoretical propositions that emphasise multi-directional and non-linear relationships, particularly when datasets have limited depth. Such challenges may explain the modest number of quantitative comparative macro-level studies of political economy and penal policy to date.

Key contributors have instead used predominantly theoretical and/or qualitative case study analysis to unpack connections between penal policy and political economy (e.g., Cavadino and Dignan, Reference Cavadino and Dignan2012; Lacey et al., Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018; Garland, Reference Garland2020). This mirrors the wider institutionalist comparative political economy field, not least because the “thick description” that case studies allow offers “one way to try to pin down the complicated relationships between institutions, actors, and interests” (Immergut, Reference Immergut, Wimmer and Kössler2006: 245). However, this brings the risk of a small number of cases dominating theoretical discussion. Arguably, this has occurred in debates about penal policy, where attention often focuses on a small number of “exceptional” states, such as the highly punitive United States (Garland, Reference Garland2020; Lacey and Soskice, Reference Lacey, Soskice, Lacey, Soskice, Cheliotis and Xenakis2021) or the welfare-driven approach of Nordic countries (Lappi-Seppälä, Reference Lappi-Seppälä2012; Pratt, Reference Pratt2007; Crewe et al., Reference Crewe, Ievins, Larmour, Laursen, Mjåland and Schliehe2022). Indeed, some of the best examples of broad-based quantitative comparative analysis have also focused on these cases (e.g., Lappi-Seppälä, Reference Lappi-Seppälä2012, Reference Lappi-Seppälä and Reitz2018).

Karstedt (Reference Karstedt2015: 377) argues that comparative penology can utilise configurational approaches to address these challenges because they capture the influence of combinations of multiple conditions on outcomes, providing a “middle ground between macro-level models and “exceptional” cases.” QCA is the most prominent configurational approach (Ragin, Reference Ragin2008; Rihoux and Ragin, Reference Rihoux and Ragin2009; Oana et al., Reference Oana, Schneider and Thomann2021) and has been widely deployed in comparative social policy analysis. However, very few papers in criminology have used QCA as a means of unpacking complex causality (key exceptions include: Stevens, Reference Stevens2016; Cruz, Reference Cruz2021), and it has not yet been employed in a study of political economy and punitiveness.

Findings

Pathways to high punitiveness

Necessity

In simple set relations, necessary conditions are always present in cases with the outcome, that is, there should be no instance in which the outcome is present but the condition is absent. In fsQCA, this logic is adapted to account for the fact that cases have fuzzy membership of sets (rather than binary “in” or “out” membership) and fsQCA protocols permit small deviations from perfect set relations as they are usually “less than perfect” in reality (Oana et al., Reference Oana, Schneider and Thomann2021). Applying a consistency value of at least 0.9 and coverage and relevance of necessity values at a minimum of 0.6 (as suggested by Oana et al., Reference Oana, Schneider and Thomann2021; Mello, Reference Mello2022), one condition emerges as necessary for high-punitiveness (PR): non-membership of the strong economic coordination set (~EC). In other words, being an LME is a necessary condition for membership of the high punitiveness set. Therefore, our QCA findings resonate with the suggestion that VoC and punitiveness are in some way related.

Sufficiency

In simple set relations, sufficient conditions are those that always lead to the outcome of interest. Once again, in the proposed fsQCA, this logic is adapted to account for fuzzy set membership and small deviations from the perfect set relations. Sufficiency analysis, which accommodates the possibilities of conjunctural causality and equifinality detailed above, entails production of “truth tables” detailing all logically possible combinations of sets and the outcome they display, to identify all possible “solutions” (combinations of conditions that sit in a sufficiency relationship with the outcome). These are then logically minimised to the fewest possible unique solutions. Different approaches to logical minimisation exist; here, we present “intermediate” overall solutions, meaning the logical minimisation is guided by theoretical expectations, and use an enhanced version of the standard analysis (see Footnote Note 2) to remove untenable assumptions prior to logical minimisation of the solution (Oana et al., Reference Oana, Schneider and Thomann2021).

Overall solution

Table 2 summarises the two pathways to high punitiveness. Pathway 1a (IN*WS*MV* ~ EC) – featuring Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States – which we label “punitive Anglophone LMEs,” combines high inequality (IN), weak social protection (WS), a majoritarian voting system (MV), and weak economic coordination (~EC, i.e., an LME). This maps strongly against theoretical expectations and key cases in the literature. The second pathway to high punitiveness, 1b (IN* ~ WS* ~ TR* ~ EC) – Korea, Portugal, and Spain, countries less often invoked in comparative discussions of punitiveness – “neglected punitive LMEs,” is a little more nuanced. Here, we find countries that do not fall into the weak social protection set (~WS) but have high underlying inequality (IN) and weak economic coordination (~EC, i.e., they are also LMEs), combined with low levels of social trust (~TR). These countries’ position as LMEs with high underlying market inequality does fit claims about interconnections between punitiveness and political economy, but the stronger social protections they offer goes against the grain of theoretical expectations.

Table 2.

Enhanced intermediate solution for high punitiveness

Note: ☑ indicates the presence of a condition.

☒ indicated the absence of a condition.

– indicates the condition does not matter.

Based on standard QCA metrics, the overall solution – that is, the two pathways together (IN*WS*MV* ~ EC + IN* ~ WS* ~ TR* ~ EC) – is a strong one. It is highly consistent (a measure of how well subset relations in the solution fit the outcome: 0.869 here) and has a high level of coverage (a measure of how much of the outcome can is explained by the solution: 0.762 here). It is good practice to visually inspect a sufficiency plot (Figure 1) alongside these metrics, not least because this helps maintain a focus on cases. These plots should not be read as linear regressions; the different quadrants signify different logical relationships between the cases and the solution formula. Deviant cases “consistency in kind” – holding membership of the solution but not the outcome – would undermine claims that the solution is sufficient for the outcome. These would appear in the bottom right quadrant, but there are no cases here in Figure 1. Deviant cases “consistency in coverage” – cases that hold membership of the outcome but not the solution – are shown in the top left quadrant. Here we find one case not covered by the solution formula, New Zealand. These cases are viewed as less critical for the robustness of the overall solution because they do not contradict claims that the pathway is sufficient for the outcome. Nonetheless, they are cases of interest because they display the outcome under investigation, but a consistent pathway explaining their membership cannot be identified, perhaps pointing to conditions missing from the analysis.

Figure 1.

Sufficiency plot (outcome = PR).

Robustness checks

QCA good practice increasingly stresses the value of applying computer-aided processes for assessing the robustness of the solution formula (Oana et al., Reference Oana, Schneider and Thomann2021: 123). Such checks assess how far the solution would alter with multiple alternative, but plausible, analytic choices (e.g., different thresholds for set membership or alternative thresholds for assessing the consistency of a solution). Some suggested tests are of limited applicability for our study, but we applied Oana et al.’s (Reference Oana, Schneider and Thomann2021) procedures using alternative test solutions that varied the calibration of the punitiveness set and the consistency thresholds applied to sufficiency tests (see Footnote Note 2). The solution remains highly consistent (RF_cons 0.992) when subjected to these plausible changes in key analytic decisions but coverage less so (RF_cov 0.513). The solution is therefore graded with a robust cases rank (RCR) of three out of four on the basis that some cases it covers are “shaky”: Korea, Portugal, and Spain.

The robustness checks add useful information to the overall picture. The punitive Anglophone LMEs pathway appears highly robust and, as such, a strongly plausible explanation for high punitiveness in these countries, although the absence of New Zealand from this grouping requires some explanation. By contrast, the neglected punitive LMEs pathway highlights strongly punitive cases less often discussed in the literature, whose features fit less well with mainstream theory (e.g., around social protection). Given that all cases in this pathway are “shaky typical cases,” this points to some gaps in the dominant theoretical explanations of the institutional drivers of high punitiveness.

Case-oriented reflection

QCA encourages post-analysis case-based reflection, not least because this can strengthen the explanatory potential of QCA-generated solutions by offering insights into causal mechanisms associated with a given pathway, or highlight factors omitted from the QCA (see Footnote Note 2) (Oana et al., Reference Oana, Schneider and Thomann2021: 181–182).

New Zealand shares many features with the punitive Anglophone LMEs, but is omitted from the pathway because it has proportional representation. Lacey (Reference Lacey2012) argues that New Zealand’s 1996 transition to proportional representation occurred in the context of a collapse of public confidence in politics. She suggests that the introduction of referenda allowed single issues such as crime to shape political priorities, while the rise of “law and order” style politics among newly empowered small parties created an adversarial institutional profile quite distinct from that of the proportional representation nations of continental Europe. This suggests our “majoritarian voting” set could be adapted to capture the extent to which institutions foster an adversarial political culture.

The neglected punitive LMEs do not feature prominently in the comparative literature on punitiveness and may point to factors under-theorised in debate, particularly as none of the cases in the pathway have majoritarian voting systems. However, Korea, like New Zealand, may be misclassified here: while its parliament is elected via a semi-proportional multi-member system, it has a directly elected president chosen via first-past-the-post. There are good reasons to focus on its presidential branch given the strength of the president and the adversarial contestation of the post (Han, Reference Han, Han, Pacheco Pardo and Cho2021). For Portugal and Spain, whose voting system classification is much less contentious, their relatively recent (1970s) transition from authoritarian to democratic politics may be an important contextual factor in unpacking long-term political culture. For example, Makin (Reference Makin2013) has argued that initial moves away from authoritarian-era high punitiveness in Spain were short-lived and that it soon returned as part of political contestation, with populist agendas becoming a key part of election-winning formulas for left and right.

While the neglected punitive LMEs run counter to theoretical expectations because they are not classed as having weak social support, qualifications must be made. Korea’s placement outside the weak social protection set might be seen as surprising given its low social spending (Yang, Reference Yang2020), but our analysis reflects it combines a low net replacement rate with relatively strong employment protection. However, this indicator may not capture the nuances of labour precarity in Korea, where levels of self-employment and platform work are comparatively high (Lee, Reference Lee2023). Classic arguments about the model of welfare in southern Europe (e.g., Ferrera, Reference Ferrera1996), which highlight significant gaps in the social safety net and strong status differentials, may also leave some surprised at the classification of social protection in Portugal and Spain. Both (particularly Portugal) have relatively high replacement rates in our income protection indicator. However, alternative indicators of cash protection that exclude their relatively generous insurance-based payments – such as the OECD’s “adequacy of minimum income benefits” indicator – would have placed them towards the bottom of the sample. Overall, this group of cases map uneasily against many common indicators of welfare state effort, underlining the value of embedding case-oriented reflections into QCA analysis and pointing to future research agendas that unpack the case nuance further in order to understand the institutional dynamics fuelling high punitiveness in these neglected LME cases.

Pathways to low punitiveness

Necessary and sufficient conditions

The principle of asymmetrical causation means that routes to low punitiveness cannot be presumed to mirror those to high punitiveness. Underlining this, while our QCA identified LME membership as a necessary condition for high punitiveness, no conditions were identified as necessary for low punitiveness.

With respect to sufficient conditions, the enhanced intermediate approach resulted in model ambiguity when minimising the truth table, with two potential models identified. QCA good practice recommends that model ambiguity is always reported and a clear justification is provided for choosing one model over another (Oana et al., Reference Oana, Schneider and Thomann2021). The two models heavily overlapped, and we selected the model with the strongest overall consistency and coverage, which also resonated more clearly with arguments in the theoretical and case-based literature, all contributing to our view that it was the more credible model (see Footnote Note 2).

Overall solution

Table 3 summarises the low punitiveness solution. Pathway 2a (~IN* ~ WS*EC), “low punitiveness egalitarian CMEs,” combines low inequality, stronger social protection, and high economic coordination (i.e., a CME) and covers a large number of cases: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. This fits well with key theoretical arguments and covers key cases usually cited in discussions of low punitiveness.

Table 3.

Enhanced intermediate solution for low punitiveness

Note: ☑ indicates the presence of a condition.

☒ indicated the absence of a condition.

– indicates the condition does not matter.

Pathway 2c (~WS* ~ MV*EC), “low punitiveness CMEs with proportional representation,” heavily overlaps with Pathway 2a. It includes high economic coordination and stronger social protection, with non-majoritarian voting rather than low inequality. It adds two further cases to the overall solution – Germany and Greece – while featuring all countries in Pathway 2a apart from France.

Finally, Pathway 2b (WS* ~ TR* ~ MV), which we label neglected low punitiveness cases with proportional representation, covers just two cases. These cases are less commonly cited as exemplars of welfarist approaches – Ireland and Japan – and the pathway fits uneasily with theoretical expectations, combining weak social protection, low levels of trust, and a non-majoritarian voting system. This pathway is more troubling for the dominant arguments in the literature.

The overall solution – the combination of the three pathways (~IN* ~ WS*EC + WS* ~ TR* ~ MV + ~WS* ~ MV*EC) – is a strong one, being highly consistent (0.905) with a high level of coverage (0.748). The sufficiency plot (Figure 2) shows there are no deviant cases consistency in kind (bottom right quadrant) and no deviant cases consistency in coverage (top left quadrant).

Figure 2.

Sufficiency plot (outcome = ~PR).

We applied the same robustness checks for this solution, and it remained highly consistent (RF_cons 0.976), with strongly robust coverage (RF_cov 0.701), producing an RCR of one out of four, the “best” outcome in Oana et al.’s (Reference Oana, Schneider and Thomann2021) framework, indicating no cases are “shaky.” The absence of deviant or shaky cases points to a very robust and consistent explanation of the routes to low punitiveness, providing strong support for comparative political economy perspectives. However, the uneasy relationship between the neglected low punitiveness cases and proportional representation pathway to the core theoretical expectations requires explanation.

Concluding discussion

The causal complexity unpacked by QCA’s configurational approach can make findings difficult to digest. To aid movement from case details to the “big picture” questions of political economy that theorists have grappled with, Table 4 compares the findings against theoretical expectations. With the exception of social trust, which is likely a weak proxy for culture, our QCA findings provide strong support for key dimensions of the political economy and punitiveness thesis. As Lacey et al. (Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018) suggested, the clusters identified in the VoC thesis – and related institutional complementarities – map strongly against high and low punitiveness cases. With regard to culture/societal values, we might also note that this dimension features much less strongly in the VoC literature than in other strands of the comparative capitalisms literature such as the Business Systems Theory approach (see Wood et al., Reference Wood and Allen2020 for an overview)

Table 4.

Overview expectations and findings

However, our analysis also adds further nuance to this debate. While the larger pathways – which covered common exemplars of high and low punitiveness – matched theoretical expectations well, the smaller pathways captured neglected cases and underexplored or unexplored institutional configurations that sat less easily with theoretical expectations. These cases and configurations merit greater attention and may point to the need for some refinement of theoretical propositions in comparative political economy debates about cross-national variations in punitiveness. For example, Ireland may offer important insights into the wider dynamics that can steer LMEs towards low punitiveness; notably, it shares many features with the high punitiveness Anglophone LMEs, but differs in having well-established proportional representation.

Moreover, our fsQCA provides the first systematic empirical cross-national assessment of Lacey et al.’s (Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018) suggestion that comparative political economy provides a strong framework for explaining cross-national variations in punitiveness and, caveats in Table 4 notwithstanding, the findings provide clear endorsement of their thesis. Our findings raise the question of whether penal policy forms one of the institutional complementarities found in each VOC; Lacey et al. (Reference Lacey, Soskice and Hope2018: 212) suggested as much when pointing to the strengths of a “comparative political economy model, with its close attention to institutional particularities and their concrete shaping of incentives.”

The VoC thesis originated as an actor-centred political economy approach that presents the institutional context in which firms and other organisations operate as an incentivising driver for their strategic interaction with their environment. In turn, this makes the institutional context a key explanatory factor in the development of different models of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, Reference Hall and Soskice2001). At first sight, the relevance of firm-level incentives for criminal justice policy seems limited. While Wood et al. (Reference Wood, Dibben and Ogden2014) have suggested a weakness of the comparative capitalisms literature is its failure to explore how overlapping state supported military-industrial and penal complexes drive some sectors of the USA’s LME, few theorists have drawn such links. Indeed, on the contrary, Cavadino and Dignan (Reference Cavadino and Dignan2013: 291) expressed some scepticism about the link between VoC and penality, questioning whether decision-makers are really incentivised to connect distant factors such as economic coordination and penal punitiveness. How might we reconcile such prima facie instincts with the findings from our systematic cross-national analysis?

In articulating the role of mutually reinforcing institutional complementarities across distinct social, economic, and political spheres, the VoC thesis holds open the possibility of what we dub here “nested institutional complementarities,” whereby disparate spheres of political economy can be connected in an “indirect” manner. In particular, we note that widely cited comparative political economy studies of criminal justice have argued that welfare (state) regimes shape punitiveness (notably Cavadino and Dignan, Reference Cavadino and Dignan2013) and, at the same time, widely cited comparative political economy studies of social protection have argued that cross-national variations in welfare map against different VoC (notably Estevez-Abe, Iversen and Soskice’s (Reference Estevez-Abe, Iversen, Soskice, Hall and Soskice2001) suggestion that different modes of economic coordination are accompanied by complementary “welfare production regimes”). Connecting the two develops a theoretical rationale for viewing penal policy regimes as one of the institutional complementarities found in different VoCs, with welfare regimes acting as a bridge between penal policy and modes of economic coordination.

In offering this notion of “nested institutional complementarities” our analysis provides a further step on the road in demonstrating the value of applying the VoC framework to penal policy analysis, which as Gallo (Reference Gallo, Lacey, Soskice, Cheliotis and Xenakis2021: 268) argues, helps “systematise our accounts of penal variation, moving beyond description of difference and towards an understanding of stable and recurring dynamics that might be resilient to political changes” by placing institutional complementarities at its core. More detailed case-based analysis in future research is required to articulate these connections further, but existing detailed national case studies of penality already offer insights that might be built on; for example, Pratt’s (Reference Pratt2007) study of the development of Scandinavia’s penal exceptionalism underscores that an expansive welfare state was central in embedding the culture and values that led to this approach.

Future work, including case-oriented analysis, might also adopt a broader view of punitiveness than captured by our outcome measure (see Footnote Note 2); incarceration rates offer a narrow view of punitiveness, and a wider perspective would include better understanding of how punishment, penality, and policing interact in different countries (Newburn and Jones, Reference Newburn and Jones2022), issues we were unable to explore due to lack of suitable comparative data. National incarceration rates also miss important variations within countries that feature prominently in high-profile case studies of punitiveness. Notably “The role of race in US crime policy […] is sometimes posited as the primary factor in American punitive exceptionalism” (Lappi-Seppälä, Reference Lappi-Seppälä and Reitz2018: 246), and data limitations are a barrier to cross-national analysis here too, although Anderson’s (Reference Anderson2023) recent work on ethnoracial disproportion in incarceration rates across 16 countries around the year 2016 shows what might be possible in future as researchers develop new datasets.

Other factors that might fruitfully be considered in future work include: variations within countries arising from federalism, devolution, and decentralisation (Brangan, Reference Brangan2020; McAra, Reference McAra and Crawford2011); the role differences in political discourse play in shaping the dynamics of criminal justice policymaking (Gallo, Reference Gallo, Lacey, Soskice, Cheliotis and Xenakis2021); and a richer temporal analysis of long-run and short-run factors, including ongoing changes in our five institutional domains. The latter might capture dynamic changes within pathways and the movement of cases between them, addressing the risk that studies of political economy and punitiveness can produce overly deterministic accounts (Gallo, Reference Gallo, Lacey, Soskice, Cheliotis and Xenakis2021). Such an approach might usefully combine with focuses on the under-explored cases and configurations of conditions – particularly those that challenge the theoretical assumptions – that we identify here.