Is the Party Really Over? Parties, Partisanship and the Politics of Crime

Guiney, Thomas

Abstract

Political parties occupy a contradictory position in the criminological literature: at once active participants in the political contestation of crime but virtually absent from contemporary debates concerning the relationship between crime and democratic theory. In this paper, I present a ‘rational reconstruction’ of party and partisanship as distinctive modes of political association that are vital to liberal democratic systems that take seriously (1) the value of political pluralism and (2) the limits of public reason to yield definitive answers to the crime question. Currently, political parties are failing to perform these mediating roles satisfactorily and I conclude that a stronger normative commitment to an ‘ethic of partisanship’ can help to revitalize our representative democracies and foster a better politics of crime.

Citation

Guiney, T. (2024). Is the Party Really Over? Parties, Partisanship and the Politics of Crime. British Journal of Criminology, 64(4), 947-963. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azad075

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 24, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Dec 12, 2023
• Publication Date: 2024-07
• Deposit Date: Dec 13, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 13, 2023
• Journal: British Journal of Criminology
• Print ISSN: 0007-0955
• Electronic ISSN: 1464-3529
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 64
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 947-963
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azad075
• Keywords: Law; Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous); Social Psychology; Pathology and Forensic Medicine
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/27600694
• Publisher URL: https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bjc/azad075/7470727
• Additional Information: © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.