The febrile state of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century penal politics fostered increasing cynicism about democratic politics amongst some criminologists (Bosworth 2011; Loader 2008). The temptation to engage in āpopulist punitivenessā (Bottoms 1995) or ā penal populismā (Pratt 2007; Roberts et al. 2003) became regarded as an unavoidable aspect of turn-of-the-century politics. Noting the undesirable consequences of this political obsession with crime and criminal justice, some criminologists called for matters of crime and penal policy to be āinsulatedā (Loader 2011) from the vicissitudes of electoral competitiveness. In particular, they expressed their dismay that politicians in many countries were either unaware of or willing to ignore evidence that the apparent public demand for harsher punishment was frequently based upon widespread public ignorance of some basic facts about crime and the operation of criminal justice (e.g. see Doob and Roberts 1984, 1988; Hough and Roberts 1998) . But, removing questions about how we should respond to crime from the sphere of public political debate and delegating them to āexpertsā is incompatible with democracy , which, above all things, is premised on the belief that citizens should influence the actions of their governments (Loader and Sparks 2011, 122).
As an alternative to anti-democratic insulation, some have suggested that there should be an increased focus on finding ways to make the public better informed about crime and criminal justice and thus improve their overall confidence that the system is in fact meeting their expectations (e.g. see Roberts et al. 2003). This has been referred to as a ācognitive deficit modelā of the problem (Loader 2011). However, experimental research carried out by the UK Home Office found no evidence that providing materials intended to improve the ability of members of the public to recall ākey factsā about crime and criminal justice could produce substantial and enduring effects on their confidence in the criminal justice system (see Chapman et al. 2002; Salisbury 2004; Singer and Cooper 2008, discussed at greater length in the next chapter). Information alone, then, seems unlikely to prove effective in substantially alleviating the punitive pressures experienced by politicians and governments.
In response to the problems with both the insulation- and education-based responses to the problem of ā penal populismā, Loader and Sparks (2012, 33) suggest that ā[t]he proper response to the pathologies of contemporary crime politics is to seek to craft a better democratic politics, not to flee from politics altogetherā (Loader and Sparks 2012, 33). The solution they propose would require expanding āinstitutional spacesā in which ācitizens, practitioners, political actors, and researchersā are all engaged in āinvestigating and fashioning solutions to the question of how we regulate and live comfortably with crime riskā (147). In other words, dialogue and deliberation have an important role to play in a ābetter politicsā.
Broadly speaking, the term ādeliberative methods ā refers to approaches to opinion research which emphasise the active involvement of research participants in a process of examining and debating āthe factsā of the matter on which their opinion is sought. In recent years, several commentators on criminal justice have identified a range of potential benefits in making greater use of deliberative mechanisms for understanding public opinion. These benefits include fostering a more informed public opinion (see Green 2008), allowing participants to express and transcend the intense emotions which can be generated by crime (Girling et al. 2000; Loader 2011), and bringing participants into contact with a range of lived experiences and perspectives which may be far removed from their own (Dzur 2012). There are also encouraging indications from empirical studies that deliberation can help citizens reach more considered and less punitive positions on the topic of criminal justice (e.g. see Luskin et al. 2002).
Despite these promising signs, insufficient attention has been paid to the social and political conditions which must prevail before such methods can start to challenge punitively oriented penal politics in any meaningful way. In particular, it is necessary to consider the obstacles which have, thus far, prevented them from becoming more influential and providing a viable āexit strategyā (cf. Bell 2014) from punitive penality. Arguably foremost amongst these obstacles is the more familiar survey-based approach to research which has enjoyed a long period of dominance when it comes to capturing and representing ā public opinionā and which, in England and Wales, in the arena of criminal justice, has particularly emphasised quantitative indicators of āpublic confidence in criminal justiceā.
In this book I argue that the dominant approach to researching public confidence could, and can, be bettered, and that changing this agenda could play a part in helping to bring about āa better politics of crime and its regulationā (Loader and Sparks 2011, 117). I challenge the implication (which at times becomes an explicit assertion) that public confidence has to be researched in a particular way because of the inherent characteristics it has as a real object which pre-exists the research devised to measure it. I argue that this perspective closes down debate and installs one way of knowing in an unwarranted position of dominance over others.
The question of how and why research on public confidence in criminal justice emerged and developed in the way that it did is no mere methodological matter. What can count as knowledge is contingent upon circumstance, is open to transformation, and has wider social and political effects. Though there may be understandable reasons why the knowledge produced has taken the form it has, there is no necessity in the dominant approach to public confidence, and it is not without its costs. In this book I show that researchers who make claims about āpublic confidenceā based on survey-based methods took a highly topical and evocative ālay conceptā and worked with it as if it referred unproblematically to some real, pre-existing object. The error, to use Durkheimās words, is this:
We are so accustomed to use these terms, and they recur so constantly in our conversation, that it seems unnecessary to render their meaning precise. We simply refer to the common notion. (Durkheim 1938, 37)
This book tells a story about how the two words denoting the lay conceptāāpublic confidenceāāwent on a journey and, in the process, were transformed. The journey sees the two words moving across boundaries between different realms of discourse: from political speeches and newspaper articles, into research reports and academic books and journals. By the point in their journey where this book leaves them, the words have moved beyond their original role as a useful but vague rhetorical token and come to be understood by many as denoting something quite specific and real: a pliable social phenomenon that governments can exhort public sector workers to change, and that researchers can claim to measure reliably.
In telling this story, my primary analytical purpose is to show that this transformation of public confidence was contingent upon other developments, social and political. I argue that the development of a public confidence agenda (in research and in policy) cannot be attributed to the inherent characteristics of a pre-existing, independent, social phenomenon, pure, real, awaiting, and deserving investigation.1 Neither did the dominant, survey-based approach to researching public confidence (which I will later describe as aggregative, general, atomised, passiveāAGAP) become dominant because of its inherent methodological superiority. The public confidence agenda was carved out of the raw materials of historical circumstance and political opportunity and has its own consequences for history and politics.
So, to the story. It began at least 400 years ago. The British Library database of British newspapers and pamphlets from 1600 to 1911 contains almost 25,000 articles, advertisements, letters to the editor, and transcribed speeches which deploy the term āpublic confidenceā. With considerable regularity and consistency, the term has been used to denote support for persons, actions, organisations, or some other category of thing, from politicians to race horses, stocks, and shares, to the health benefits of cocoa. Yet the authors of these articles, speeches, and adverts never defined public confidence. Rather, they used the words as a rhetorical token, standing ...