Police, Politics, and Demobilization: Police and Participatory Feedback Effects in the United Kingdom

• In Event: Comparative Perspectives on Police-Community Relations

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between policing and political participation in the United Kingdom. A growing literature in the United States suggests that personal and vicarious interactions with the criminal justice system can reduce individual and collective likelihood of engaging in civic and political action. It is unclear, however, the extent to which this demobilizing effect is a function of the size, scope, and punitiveness of the American criminal justice system, or reflects a more fundamental and generalizable consequence of contact with the criminal justice system or systems of social control. This paper suggests that the demobilizing consequences of criminal justice contact are not specific to the United States and mobilizes publicly available data on policing and political participation in the United Kingdom to test this hypothesis. Results from ordinary least squares and panel fixed effects regressions finds lower levels of participation in communities subject to higher levels of policing. The paper discuses the implication of these findings for the criminal justice system in the United Kingdom, and for discourses on the evolution and possible convergence of social control in advanced Western democracies.

Author

• Ayobami Laniyonu, University of Los Angeles, California