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Why Globalisation Doesn’t Spell Convergence: Models of Institutional Variation and the Comparative Political Economy of Punishment

This paper argues that contemporary patterns of punishment can only be fully understood through comparative analysis, and makes in particular a case for a political – economic approach based on the analysis of comparative institutional advantage of differently structured systems. This comparative advantage explains why, notwithstanding a measure of globalization and policy transfer in criminal justice, longstanding differences in the penal practices of different countries persist. The paper also examines the distrust of model-building in contemporary social theories of punishment, acknowledging that this distrust proceeds from some legitimate and eminently understandable concerns: but arguing that it is nonetheless obstructive to the capacity of comparative research to achieve its full explanatory potential. The second part of the paper examines the objections to typology or model-building in penal theory by drawing on the case studies of New Zealand and the USA – countries which on the face of it present difficulties for the model sketched in The Prisoners’ Dilemma (2008). It argues that the objections to model-building may be more readily overcome than is usually recognized; and that the apparently different enterprises of model-building or theoretical generalization on the one hand and detailed empirical research on the other are intimately linked in a number of ways. By moving between these complementary methods, moving back and forth between model and data, it is possible to revise and refine models in the light of further findings. And this in turn will open up new and fruitful fields of local empirical inquiry for criminologists and others. .