Political Institutions, Minorities, and Punishment: A Pooled Cross-National Analysis of Imprisonment Rates

Despite their plausibility, political explanations for incarceration rates have not been intensely investigated. Centralized democracies that reduce public influence by using corporatist methods to resolve disputes should have lower incarceration rates, but the opposite should be true in decentralized polities with federalist political arrangements where mass publics have greater control over punishment. Threat hypotheses are assessed by examining the effects of minority presence and economic inequality. This study uses a panel design to examine these effects on imprisonment rates in 13 of the most progressive democracies from 1970 to 1995. With the murder or overall crime rates, social disorganization, and additional indicators held constant, the presence of corporatist and federalist political arrangements explain cross-national differences in incarceration rates. The evidence suggests that internal racial or ethnic threat produces larger imprisonment rates as well. The findings indicate that a well-developed comparative political sociology of punishment should help us understand contrasts in the proportion of the population that is incarcerated in advanced democracies.