ABSTRACT
Liberalism has been emphasized as a main ideational influence on penal and welfare policies—be it the new liberalism in the late 19th century leading to penal-welfarism or the neoliberal wave in the late 20th century pushing toward cutting welfare and increasing punitiveness. However, and surprisingly so, a political science perspective that zeroes in on the actors and their strategies is mostly missing from the state of the art. Instead, the literature is dominated by general ideational and sociological arguments. To address this weakness, the present paper theorizes that political liberalism involves an economic and a cultural dimension which is taken up by its political proponents to different degrees, depending on opportunity structures in the political realm. Building on both, theories about cleavages structuring societies as well as party competition, and a more in-depth study of the ideational core of liberalism, we propose that the strategic behaviour of liberal parties can add to our understanding of penal and welfare politics. Empirically, we use two historical case studies of British and German penal and welfare policies to illustrate how liberal parties emphasize the two faces of liberalism depending on the context in which they operate.
Our analysis contributes to the literature in three ways: First, we add to our understanding of liberal politics by proposing an explanation for why liberalism has been associated with both permissiveness and toughness in penal and welfare policies. Indeed, according to our argument, this has to do with the two faces of liberalism, namely how liberal parties react to changes in economic and political contexts. And second, by proposing an empirical illustration over a long period of time, we offer a broad picture of decisive penal-welfare turns during periods when liberal parties held office. This is an important addition to a literature that has only started to focus on how political parties matter in the relationship between penal and welfare policies. And third, our study sheds light on an under-researched party family in political science—liberal parties.
