Congress and Criminalization

• In Event: Credit Claiming and Blame Avoidance in Legislative Politics

Brief Overview

We develop a measure of Congressional punitiveness with a sample of federal statutes that provide incarceration as a punishment from 1866 to 2022, and use the data to test numerous longstanding, but untested, theories of Congressional punitiveness.

Authors

• Sean Farhang, University of California-Berkeley

• Andrea Roth, University of California-Berkeley