Policy Feedback and the Criminal Justice Agenda: An Analysis of the Economy, Crime Rates, Politics and Public Opinion in Post-War Britain

Abstract

Whilst much has been written about the pace and magnitude of social, economic and political changes in Western countries during the post-war era, there has been little empirically grounded discussion of the agenda-setting capabilities of specific governments nor of the criminological shock waves that resulted from the ‘new right’ policies adopted by some governments in the 1980s. In this paper, using Britain as our case study, we explore how agenda-setting, political competition over key issues and the emergence of trends in policy agendas have influenced both crime itself and crime policies. Throughout the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher made political capital by promoting concerns about crime and her own and her government's reputation for being the natural custodians of ‘law and order’. Yet during that period, crime rose and became a policy issue in a way it never had been before. How can we understand these shifts in crime rates, their relationship to government policies and the rise of crime on the policy agenda? Using data from a range of sources dating back to 1961 and using time series modelling, we present a ‘policy feedback’ model of these processes.

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