The scale of the conceptual problem is striking. A search of the ERIC database found that more than 200 academic papers published in the last decade used the term ‘politicization’ in their title or abstract, yet with striking inconsistency. Some authors use it to describe campus climate, others as a synonym for state pressure, and still others to describe the politicization of individual identity. Many define the term not at all. The result, the authors argue, is analytical promiscuity that reduces an important phenomenon to a buzzword, leaving scholars without a shared vocabulary to detect when and how governance actually changes. Their remedy is to import rigor from political science and sociology, delineating four distinct approaches to politicization, each with its own ontology, causal mechanism, and set of empirical indicators.

The first approach, associated with political scientist Michael Zürn, defines politicization as the demand for or act of transporting an issue into the field of politics, making previously unpolitical matters political. Here, the key indicator is a shift in jurisdiction: a dispute once handled by departmental committees or professional norms migrates into parliamentary hearings and binding policy settlements. The second approach, advanced by the Sheffield School of British institutionalism, treats politicization and depoliticization as instruments of statecraft. Depoliticization, in this account, is not a retreat of politics but a governing strategy that delegates contentious issues to arm’s-length agencies, expert bodies, or market mechanisms in ways that reduce visible executive responsibility. Politicization is the reverse: a reassertion of political control into venues where elected officials can steer outcomes. The Sheffield School operationalizes this through three tactics: institutional, rule-based, and preference-shaping depoliticization or repoliticization.

The third and fourth approaches emerge from discourse theory. The constructivist view, associated with Jacques Lagroye, holds that no issue is inherently political; politicization is a social process of relabeling, in which actors successfully strip an activity of its perceived neutral or professional status and rebrand it as political. A curricular decision, such as the design of a gender studies syllabus, becomes ‘political indoctrination’ rather than academic judgment. The post-foundational approach, drawing on Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, goes further, distinguishing between ‘politics’ as routine administration and ‘the political’ as the ineradicable dimension of antagonism that such ordering attempts to contain. Politicization, in this framework, is the disruptive moment, a strike, blockade, or governance crisis, that exposes suppressed conflict beneath an apparent academic quiet.

To demonstrate how one of these frameworks works in practice, the researchers applied the Sheffield School approach to Israel, a country whose higher education system was historically characterized by strong arm’s-length autonomy yet now faces persistent allegations of state encroachment. The historical arc is essential to the analysis. Israel’s universities, founded on Humboldtian ideals of academic freedom before the state existed, clashed after 1948 with a nation-building ethos that viewed higher education as a strategic instrument. The friction produced the 1958 Council for Higher Education Law, which created an independent statutory body dominated by academics and public figures, an early form of institutional depoliticization. In 1974, the Planning and Budgeting Committee, modeled on the UK’s University Grants Committee, moved the power of the purse to an autonomous academic-led subcommittee, further insulating the sector from political control.

The pendulum then swung the other way. From the early 1970s, surging demand for access among marginalized populations overwhelmed the elitist status quo, and state authorities intervened more directly, culminating in a 1995 amendment that granted college degrees equal status to university degrees. Institutions nearly tripled, and cohort participation reached roughly 50 percent by 2010. A secondary wave of depoliticization followed, as the Ministry of Finance’s Budget Division defined the macro-parameters and budgetary rules for the Planning and Budgeting Committee, bypassing both the Cabinet and the Knesset and cementing a technocratic governance model. This era, the authors stress, did not signal a retreat of the state but a reconfiguration of control, with fiscal rules prioritizing market logic over traditional social or academic mandates.

The empirical core of the study covers 2010 to 2025 and rests on three methods: 22 semi-structured elite interviews with former ministers, members of Knesset, and regulatory and university leaders; deductive analysis of higher education legislation; and descriptive statistics tracking the composition of the Council for Higher Education and the Planning and Budgeting Committee. The legislative record reveals a clear escalation. Amendment 18 prohibited state scholarships for students evading military conscription, passing with a broad bipartisan majority. Proposed Amendment 19, based on the recommendations of the professional Messer-Yaron Committee, would have consolidated governance under a unified statutory Higher Education Authority, but it died in cabinet after the 2015 elections. Interviewees described the moment in vivid terms. One recalled a minister objecting that the reforms would have prevented the establishment of Ariel University, while a senior council official described a minister telling the prime minister that the plan meant losing all control over higher education, and at that moment, it died.

Subsequent legislative moves intensified the trend. The 2018 Amendment 20 applied Israeli sovereignty to academic institutions in the occupied Palestinian territories, cementing the controversial upgrade of Ariel University and signaling the subordination of the council’s professional guidance to the political establishment. Proposed Amendment 22 went further, compelling institutions to dismiss employees suspected of supporting terrorism under threat of budgetary sanctions, shifting adjudication responsibility from the police to the academy and targeting institutions for refusing to penalize lawful academic speech. Meanwhile, amendments to the 2007 Student Rights Law, originally a consumer-protection statute that explicitly avoided academic content, began to intrude into credit allocation and speech regulation. A 2018 law mandating academic credit for state-sanctioned volunteering effectively nationalized the university’s currency, stripping senates of their authority to define academic value, and it passed with broad bipartisan support.

The statistical evidence is perhaps the most dramatic finding. University representation on the Council for Higher Education collapsed from a majority of 67 percent in the ninth council to a minority of 29 percent in the fourteenth. The share of the elite ‘Old 4’ research universities, responsible for some 70 percent of national research output, was cut nearly in half, from 37 to 19 percent, and their representation on the Planning and Budgeting Committee dropped to zero by 2023. Concurrently, the college sector surged from 7 to 39 percent. The researchers trace this transformation to a deliberate strategy of ‘membership engineering’ that began around 2001, when Education Minister Limor Livnat launched a campaign titled ‘Ending the Cartel,’ framing universities as a detached, self-serving liberal elite. The rhetorical tactic of labeling universities a ‘cartel’ legitimized the dilution of their representation, a textbook case of preference-shaping that weakened the institutional barrier of depoliticization. Interviewees noted that the statutory duty to consult universities carried no teeth, amounting to symbolic consultation in which ministers could consult and then decide otherwise.

The study’s conclusions carry weight well beyond Israel. First, student rights legislation can be weaponized as an attack surface on institutional autonomy, with the language of public good and access morphing into an individualized, rights-based discourse that masks state intervention. Second, politicization often involves the targeted delegitimization of intermediary bodies rather than their formal abolition. Third, and perhaps most counterintuitively, politicization is not an exclusively partisan practice: several controversial bills enjoyed bipartisan support, and once depoliticization norms are breached, the appetite for executive control appears to transcend the left-right divide. Fourth, the transition from professional autonomy to political contingency is cumulative, and once politicization practices are institutionalized, they appear difficult to reverse regardless of which party holds power. For democracies facing neo-nationalist pressures, from the United States to Hungary to Brazil, Israel serves as a diagnostic warning that politicization is a tangible threat resulting from deliberate administrative strategy, not merely inflammatory speech. The researchers also note that universities are not passive: the Association of University Heads has mounted legal challenges and lobbied against legislative overreach, and external metrics now classify Israel as a ‘newly registered decliner’ on the Academic Freedom Index. By converting a vague catch-all into a systematic research program with observable mechanisms, the study offers scholars and policymakers a blueprint for detecting, and perhaps resisting, the quiet machinery of political control over the academy.

Subject of Research: Politicization and governance of higher education systems

Article Title: Beyond the buzz: analyzing (re)politicization in higher education

Article References: Fraenkel, Y., & Bamberger, A. (2026). Beyond the buzz: analyzing (re)politicization in higher education. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01787-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01787-y

Keywords: higher education, politicization, governance, academic freedom, Israel, Sheffield School, depoliticization, neo-nationalism, populism, student rights, university autonomy, public policy

The researchers started from a puzzle. In science and technology studies, a controversy is not merely public disagreement. It is a sustained, traceable dispute in which experts challenge one another, lay participants develop genuine expertise, and stable groups of concerned citizens form around a specific issue. Think of debates over nuclear waste siting or vaccine safety, where affected publics acquire technical vocabulary, contest official evidence, and organize into durable issue publics. AI, despite endless declarations of its controversial nature, shows remarkably few of these features. A search of the scholarly literature confirmed the authors’ suspicion: when researchers use the word controversy in connection with AI, they overwhelmingly mean generic public disagreement or scandal, not the analytical apparatus of controversy mapping.

Romele and his colleagues argue that this diagnosis of absence mistakes the form of the conflict for its existence. The conflict over AI is real, but it has been displaced along two axes. Horizontally, it has moved from the inaccessible technical object, whose inner workings few citizens can meaningfully contest, onto the imaginaries surrounding it: visions of job destruction, surveillance, and institutional capture. Vertically, it has shifted from a controversy among citizens and experts into an antagonism that opposes a unified people to an institutional order that AI is taken to embody. To read this displaced conflict, the authors contend, the standard tools of controversy analysis must be supplemented with political theory.

The theoretical move draws on the theory of hegemony developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Where controversy analysis assumes that legitimate participation requires expertise and that the reality of conflict resides in technical objects, hegemony theory treats symbolic formations as genuine sites of political struggle. In this framework, AI functions as what Laclau called an empty signifier: a condensed symbol onto which heterogeneous grievances, from unemployment to the cost of living to distrust of media and elites, can be articulated. The resulting structure is populist in a precise, non-pejorative sense, constructing a people against an adversary understood as the institutional establishment.

The empirical backbone of the study is a dataset of 1,148,092 comments posted on 4,244 videos from TF1.info, the YouTube channel of France’s largest private television broadcaster. The team compared the publics that gather around AI videos with those forming around three other contested technoscientific domains: electric vehicles, nuclear technologies, and climate change. They then mapped the intersections between these issue publics and the publics of French political parties, asking whether engagement with AI tracks partisan affiliation the way engagement with climate or nuclear energy does.

The quantitative mapping delivered a striking negative result. Around electric vehicles, nuclear power, and climate change, the researchers could identify relatively coherent issue publics whose activity intersects in patterned ways with party-political communities. Around AI, no such structure emerged. Public formation was weak: commenters on AI videos did not cluster into stable, recognizable constituencies, and their overlap with partisan publics was comparatively thin. In the vocabulary of controversy studies, AI has not generated the issue publics that a genuine technoscientific controversy would produce. The technology is talked about everywhere, but it belongs to no one in particular.

The qualitative analysis explains what is happening instead. The researchers read in their entirety the comments on 23 AI-related videos, attending to three dimensions: whether a comment used a technical register, where its critique was aimed, and whether AI was linked to grievances external to the technology. A comment was treated as expressing vertical antagonism only when it combined the last two features, directing critique upward at institutions, elites, or media while folding AI into a broader chain of grievances. Ordinary negativity about the technology’s performance, humor without an institutional target, and disagreement among commenters were explicitly not counted as antagonism.

What emerged from this close reading was a consistent pattern. Commenters rarely engaged with AI at a technical level. There was little specialized vocabulary, few references to documentation, and almost no design-level argument of the kind the authors found in the electric vehicle comments, where users debated battery energy density, thermal constraints, and the carbon debt of manufacturing with genuine specificity. Instead, AI comments aimed their fire at institutional actors and articulated the technology as one element in a wider story of dispossession: jobs lost, purchasing power eroded, representation hollowed out, and a media class that talks down to ordinary people. AI condensed institutional power into a single, graspable target.

This finding reframes a debate that has preoccupied scholars and policymakers. A growing body of work has called for eliciting the AI controversies we need, seeking to provoke the lay expertise and issue publics that AI has so far failed to generate. Romele and his colleagues push back against this program. If the conflict over AI is not a missing controversy but a displaced antagonism, then the task is not to engineer the former but to recognize the latter. Treating populist anger about AI as a deficit of technical deliberation misreads the situation and risks deepening the very estrangement it hopes to cure.

The implications reach beyond France and beyond YouTube. As governments roll out national AI strategies and corporations flood the public sphere with sociotechnical imaginaries of transformation, the symbolic battlefield may matter more than the technical one. A democratic politics of AI, the authors suggest, begins by acknowledging that when people argue about artificial intelligence, they are often arguing about something else: who holds power, who benefits, and who gets to decide. Recognizing that conflict, rather than trying to redirect it into expert debate, is the precondition for giving it democratically sustainable form.

Subject of Research: Displaced political antagonism and populist conflict in public discourse on artificial intelligence

Article Title: Artificial intelligence as political antagonism: media traces of a displaced conflict

Article References: Romele, A., Bert-Erboul, C., & Mésangeau, J. (2026). Artificial intelligence as political antagonism: media traces of a displaced conflict. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03303-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03303-3

Keywords: artificial intelligence, populism, hegemony, controversy analysis, science and technology studies, YouTube comments, public debate, sociotechnical imaginaries, Laclau and Mouffe, media analysis, issue publics, AI & Society

The paradox that motivates the analysis is stark. During the first Trump campaign, public attention focused on low-income families hit by de-industrialization and on middle-income households anxious about their status. Today the movement is openly endorsed by figures such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta donated one million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund despite earlier personal disputes. PayPal founder Peter Thiel backed Trump from the start, and his association with J.D. Vance helped secure Vance’s path to the vice presidency. Elon Musk’s brief tenure at the head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency signaled that the agenda of some technology leaders extends beyond lower corporate taxes and deregulation. It reflects a conviction that the established administrative structures of the federal government should be dismantled to make room for radical innovation.

Yet the fiscal record cuts directly against the interests of the movement’s poorest supporters. The legislation nicknamed the Big Beautiful Bill cuts spending on Medicaid and the food assistance program SNAP by roughly 900 billion dollars through 2034, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. The CBO’s distributional analysis shows that the bill’s tax cuts most benefit the highest income groups while the combined effect of tax and benefit changes is most damaging to the lowest deciles. Rural areas, where Medicaid dependence is high, will bear a disproportionate share of the losses, and rural voters form one of Trump’s most reliable constituencies. In counties where at least a quarter of voters’ personal income comes from government transfers, 63 percent cast their ballots for Trump in 2024. How can a movement simultaneously reward its wealthiest backers and strip benefits from the people who vote for it most loyally?

The demographic evidence deepens the puzzle rather than resolving it. Trump won those with a high school diploma or less by twenty points, and voters who attend religious services monthly or more often by thirty points, yet no single master variable explains the pattern. Gender, ethnicity, religion, education and place all interact: majorities of Black and Asian men backed Harris while most white and Hispanic men backed Trump; 63 percent of rural women voted for him, a 28-point margin. Income categories alone have limited explanatory power, with the lowest income tier split almost evenly, but the shift from 2020 is striking, as Biden’s 19-point advantage among the lowest earners collapsed to roughly one point for Harris. Glassmann’s conclusion is that rational-choice models of voting simply cannot account for behavior this resistant to material self-interest, and that ideology must be doing the work.

The intellectual core of the new ideology is a rejection of the economic theory that underpinned globalization. Classical trade theory, resting on David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage, holds that all nations gain when each specializes where it is relatively efficient, and that technologically leading economies would keep the high-end of the value chain while others supplied cheap labor. J.D. Vance, in a keynote at the a16z American Dynamism Summit, called this one of two great conceits of the globalization era. Because of network effects, he argued, partner economies inevitably climb into innovative, high-end production, turning economic collaboration into geopolitical rivalry. China, once dismissed as confined to labor-intensive sectors, expanded its share of world manufacturing value added sixfold between 1991 and 2012, from 4.1 to 24 percent, and now contests American technological leadership outright.

Vance’s second conceit is what he calls the hunger of Western economies for cheap labor. In this telling, Western firms were drugged by the promise that offshoring and low-wage competition would secure their competitiveness, so they stopped innovating and moved factories abroad instead. The empirical anchor here is the research on the China shock by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, which overturned the comfortable assumption that the aggregate labor-market effects of trade are negligible. Their work showed that competition from an unequally developed trading partner can impose severe, concentrated and persistent harm on specific regions and on the least educated workers, effectively creating enclaves of opposition to the global system inside democracies themselves. The steady growth of the American trade deficit since the 1970s, and its sharp acceleration after 2000, became the emblem of this failure, even though the United States retains a surplus in services trade and still leads the world in GDP.

What makes the doctrine genuinely unifying is its answer to the question of what should replace redistribution. Vance accuses Democrats of offering nothing but welfare substitutes to communities hollowed out by de-industrialization, a compassion, in his words, devoid of any expectation that reeked of giving up. Labor-market research supports the intuition behind this critique: psychological studies find that low-paid workers often fare better than the unemployed, suggesting that a sense of purpose, not just income, is decisive for well-being. The MAGA movement addresses this deficit existentially and even religiously, promising that radical reindustrialization and a national mission will restore meaning to lives that welfare checks could not. This is why, in Glassmann’s account, the ideology can override short-term material interests: it offers fulfillment of those interests the way a religious narrative offers paradise, deferred and conditional on collective struggle.

The religious register is not metaphorical. In a 2020 essay in the Catholic journal The Lamp, Vance described his conversion from atheist Yale law student to conservative Catholic, criticizing an elite culture obsessed with achievement but silent about the ultimate purpose of education. The pivotal encounter was a 2011 lecture by Peter Thiel, who linked the hyper-competitive misery of elite professionals to the technological stagnation of society at large. Thiel’s famous claim that America has stopped innovating sits oddly beside scholarship celebrating the knowledge economy, but it performs crucial ideological work: it tells both the displaced factory worker and the overworked engineer that they are losers of the same failed order. From this view, questions such as sustainable energy supply are not distributional problems but questions of civilizational survival, and therefore beyond the reach of ordinary redistributive politics.

That framing carries radical institutional consequences. If the existing state structures have blocked the necessary transformation, the argument runs, they are illegitimate and must be swept away; if multilateral institutions constrain national supremacy, they must be abandoned. Glassmann traces the philosophical machinery to Thiel’s adoption, through René Girard’s lectures at Stanford, of the concept of mimetic desire, the unconscious imitation of others’ wants, which Girard believed breeds envy and violence in groups. On this reading, liberal democracy’s promise of equality fuels destructive competition, so liberalism itself must give way to a techno-nationalist ideology wrapped in religious fervor. The result, Glassmann warns, is a strategy of conformity, or Gleichschaltung, extending through media, universities and courts, a drift toward competitive authoritarianism, withdrawal from international organizations, and unilateralism in a multipolar world, with the separation of powers itself under strain.

The article closes with an explicitly historical warning, invoking Hannah Arendt’s observation that the intellectuals who engaged with Nazi ideology were dangerous because they really believed in it, and Leo Strauss’s definition of nihilism as the desire to destroy modern civilization. Glassmann calls the present a Weimar moment, not because dictatorship is inevitable, but because the current administration has both the will and, increasingly, the capacity to overturn the constitutional order. Whether the coalition holds is an open question: inflation and growth problems caused by tariffs and investor uncertainty will test whether welfare-dependent voters continue to endorse policies that enrich tech billionaires. But the central lesson for scholars and for international actors is clear. Trumpism is not an incoherent tantrum of globalization’s losers. It is a coherent, thick, nationalist ideology, engineered to reconcile the interests of the very rich and the very poor around a global technology race, and it must be understood on those terms before its assumptions can be effectively contested.

Subject of Research: The ideological and economic foundations uniting low-income and elite supporters of the MAGA movement in the United States

Article Title: Understanding the political and economic thought of Trumpism: why have impoverished workers and wealthy technological elites in the U.S. adopted a shared ideology?

Article References: Glassmann, U. (2025). Understanding the political and economic thought of Trumpism: why have impoverished workers and wealthy technological elites in the U.S. adopted a shared ideology?. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 367-379. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00137-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00137-5

Keywords: Trumpism, populism, political ideology, globalization, China shock, comparative advantage, J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, welfare policy, competitive authoritarianism, reindustrialization

Penal populism first entered the scholarly vocabulary through the work of criminologist Anthony Bottoms, who described populist punitiveness as one of the main forces operating within contemporary criminal justice systems. The term captured how politicians, perceiving a deeply punitive public, pursue harsh penal policies for their own political gain. Later scholars broadened the concept. John Pratt described populism as a fundamental shift in the axis of penal power under the conditions of late modernity, while Mark Fenwick showed in the Japanese context that penal populism can also produce non-punitive policies, driven by an unmet demand for justice and security. What unites these accounts is the way penal policy becomes a reactive undertaking, supported not by evidence of effectiveness but by emotional resonance.

The authors illustrate the pattern with three contemporary cases. In the United States, following the murder of political activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump argued on Fox News for what he called quick trials, complaining that criminal proceedings stretching over seven or eight years allow defendants to blame their circumstances. The authors note that such statements run directly against the presumption of innocence and against criminology’s core mission of understanding why crimes are committed. In Morocco, public debate over Article 507 of the Penal Code, which prescribes life imprisonment for robbery involving a weapon, revealed how a broad statutory definition of a weapon, one that could in theory include a screwdriver, allows punishment to jump from a five-year maximum to life imprisonment, a severity that provoked a rare counter-movement by the mothers of convicted defendants. In India, the brutal 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman known to the public as Nirbhaya generated massive protests and a government-appointed reform committee, yet the resulting 2013 criminal law amendments went further than the Verma Committee recommended, expanding the death penalty despite the committee’s explicit advice against it.

Across these cases, the authors identify a recurring architecture of claims. Populists insist the system is too lenient and demand severity. They place the victim and public safety at the center of debate, framed in zero-sum terms against legal safeguards. They reject criminological inquiry into the social determinants of crime as elitist indulgence. They position themselves as the authentic voice of ordinary people against out-of-touch experts. And they appeal to emotion rather than reason, mobilising outrage and fear as political capital. The murder of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993, framed as the loss of America’s innocent child, exemplifies how such emotional mobilisation can drive rapid legal change, producing California’s Three-Strikes law within months of the abduction.

The criminological case against these claims is stark. The most widely diffused populist assumption holds that harsher penalties deter crime because rational actors weigh potential gains against potential losses. Yet the empirical literature points the other way. Anthony Doob and Cheryl Webster’s examination of numerous studies found that most reviews do not support the claim that harsher sanctions deter, and the few studies that did were found to suffer from serious methodological or conceptual problems. Daniel Nagin’s assessment of deterrence research found that evidence for the certainty of punishment, particularly the probability of apprehension, is far more consistent than evidence for the severity of punishment. A meta-analysis by Travis Pratt and colleagues reached a similar conclusion, finding that the deterrent effects of formal legal sanctions are at best modest to negligible, and that punishment effects often shrink to zero when researchers control for factors such as self-control, peer influence, and antisocial attitudes. Strikingly, the most robust deterrents identified were informal sanctions such as shame and loss of respect, suggesting that fear of social costs outweighs fear of legal punishment.

Punitive sanctions do not merely fail to deter; they can actively undermine interventions that work. Mark Lipsey’s meta-analysis of 443 studies on juvenile delinquency treatment found that outcomes favoured treatment in 64.3 percent of studies, with the best programs reducing recidivism by ten to twenty percentage points. Some punitive interventions, notably deterrence-oriented programs such as shock incarceration and Scared Straight, produced negative effects, meaning that the tools promoted as making streets safer may be making them less safe. A review by Lipsey and Francis Cullen covering both juvenile and adult offending confirmed that supervision and sanctions show at best modest reductions in recidivism and sometimes increase reoffending, while rehabilitation treatments yield consistently positive and relatively large effects. Evidence-based frameworks such as the Risk-Need-Responsivity model, which tailors interventions to an offender’s risk level, criminogenic needs, and learning style, have been shown to reduce recidivism by an average of 17 percent in custodial settings and 35 percent in community settings when all three principles are properly implemented. Research on more than 55,000 prisoners released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2011 found that warehousing inmates without programming increased the odds of recidivism by 13 percent, while participation in effective interventions lowered those odds by 12 to 26 percent.

The authors anticipate an obvious objection: even if punitiveness fails as crime control, punishment serves other purposes. Here they draw on David Garland’s sociology of punishment, which treats punishment as a complex social institution, like the family or the economy, whose meaning cannot be reduced to any single instrumental goal. Populists are entitled, the authors concede, to demand justice and just deserts. But retribution, properly understood, does not license punitiveness. Andrew von Hirsch’s principle of commensurate deserts calls for proportion between the seriousness of a crime and the severity of punishment, and raising penalties for particular offences disrupts the internal ranking of the sentencing scale while overstating an offender’s blameworthiness. As Douglas Husak argues, retribution understood as the infliction of deserved punishment producing intrinsic value can be compatible with a restrictive, even abolitionist, stance toward imprisonment. The populist move from desert to ever-greater severity thus fails on moral as well as empirical grounds.

The democratic claim fares no better. Penal populism presents itself as the voice of the people, but public opinion research suggests that the punitive consensus politicians invoke is largely manufactured. Pierre Bourdieu famously argued that public opinion does not exist in the form its purveyors claim. Julian Roberts and colleagues, drawing on data from five countries, found a wide disjuncture between superficial opinion polls and more sophisticated measures, concluding that support for punitive policies is far less solid than politicians suggest, even though crude polls carry more weight with policymakers. Katherine Beckett’s research showed that public concern about crime and drugs is strongly associated with prior political initiative on those issues, indicating that concern is often politically fabricated rather than spontaneously held. Moreover, when members of the public are given information about the consequences of punitive policies, their support for punitiveness tends to decline, and surveys consistently show public support for rehabilitation alongside other goals of punishment.

The authors are careful to acknowledge context. Criminology itself bears some responsibility for the populist backlash. Robert Martinson’s famous 1974 claim that nothing works in rehabilitation eroded public trust in expert-led penal policy, and although Martinson later retracted much of his conclusion, the damage contributed to what Garland calls the culture of control, in which states abandoned the rehabilitative ideal for risk management and punitive display. Garland has since asked whether criminologists are doing enough to communicate their knowledge credibly, warning that failing to do so leaves the way open for dangerous populist alternatives. The authors also note that a level of genuine public punitiveness exists and is substantial; their point is that opinions formed in the absence of crucial information about consequences are difficult to justify as a basis for policy.

The study’s central contribution is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. By integrating criminology, restrained retributivism, the sociology of punishment, and public opinion research, Bourekkadi and Elarraj demonstrate that penal populism invokes criminology, morality, and democracy selectively yet satisfies none of them. Its policies appeal to emotion while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy through claims of effectiveness and popular support that do not hold. The authors do not argue that punitive policies can never be defended, only that the usual justifications offered for them cannot survive scrutiny, and they hypothesise that reframing the debate around the genuine justification of punishment would drain much of the emotional appeal politicians exploit. Future research, they argue, should develop an alternative framework for penal policy, one grounded in evidence-based practice, proportionality, and democratic integrity, while addressing the structural conditions that allow populist penal policies to persist despite the fallacy of their claims.

Subject of Research: The justificatory failure of penal populism in contemporary criminal justice policy

Article Title: Penal Populism and the Failure of Its Core Claims

Article References: Penal Populism and the Failure of Its Core Claims. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00588-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00588-z

Keywords: penal populism, criminology, criminal justice, deterrence, rehabilitation, retribution, public opinion, punishment, evidence-based policy, populism, sentencing, sociology of punishment