Partisan effects and policy entrepreneurs. New Labour’s impact on British law and order policy

ABSTRACT

Under successive New Labour administrations British law and order policy experienced a significant shift. The literature, however, falls short to empirically substantiate whether this change can be attributed to the ideological preferences of the party in power – neither on the aggregate-level nor in terms of a causal mechanism. This study develops a novel partisan effects mechanism linking the notion of policy-seeking party elites with the notion of policy entrepreneurship. The applied mixed-method research design confirms a partisan link in two ways: On the aggregate-level, the first systematic analysis of the complete law and order legislation from 1990 to 2014 allows to assess the significant policy change as well as its correlation with partisan effects. On the micro-level, a qualitative analysis traces these effects within the political process of a single piece of legislation highlighting policy entrepreneurs as a causal mechanism of partisan effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Law and order
• United Kingdom
• partisan effects
• New Labour
• policy entrepreneur
• multiple streams framework

Acknowledgements

I presented a preliminary version of this study at the ECPR General Conference 2016 in Prague, where I greatly profited from the critical remarks of both discussant and audience. Furthermore, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive critique as well as Georg Wenzelburger for his encouraging and invaluable support of my work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Helge Staff is a doctoral researcher in political science (political economy) at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. His main research interests pertain to the field of comparative public policy with a strong focus on issues of security politics and governance. Besides analyses of law and order policies, he currently conducts a research project on the politics of domestic security privatization in EU member states.

Notes

1 Regarding partisan effects within the policy field of law and order in general, see Lacey (2008), Beckett and Sasson (2004), Jacobs and Helms (2001); Tepe and Vanhuysse (2013), or Wenzelburger (2015b).

2 Selection of legislative acts: 1990–2008 – Policy Agenda Project UK (Acts of UK Parliament 1911–2008, categories 12, 208, 209, and 299), http://www.policyagendas.org.uk/ (categories include law and order as well as civil rights issues, and acts regarding the security of the political systems; acts concerning secret services (category 1603) are excluded); 2009–2014 – acts selected by the author according to the Policy Agenda Project UK Codebook and legislation.gov.uk (only public general acts, same categories used as indicated above).

3 I would like to thank Mathis Petri for his great help in this regard.

4 See the online appendix for a detailed description of the control variables and the data sources used.

5 The detailed results are included in the online appendix.

6 For a detailed criminological discussion of ASB, see Brown (2004) or Mooney and Young (2006).

7 For a comparative list of the single measures and orders, see Crawford (2009, 817) or Hodgkinson and Tilley (2011, 285–286).

8 Explanatory Notes, Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003: 20

9 For a general review of the ASB policy of New Labour, see Crawford (2009), Squires (2006), or Squires (2008).

10 Interview with John Gieve, 8.7.2015, London.

11 Interview with John Gieve, 8.7.2015, London.

12 I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing this out.

13 Interview with David Blunkett, 7.7.2015, London.

Additional information

Funding

The research has been carried out within the project ‘The Politics of Law and Order’ funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) [Grant WE 4775/2-1].