Myth of Mob Rule
Subtitle: Violent Crime and Democratic Politics
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780190228705
Subjects: Crime; Violent crimes; Crime prevention; Democracy; Political sociology
Description: Drawing on a comparative analysis of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, this book explores when and with what consequences crime becomes a politically salient issue. Reversing much of the conventional wisdom, the analysis finds that serious violence and public and political attention to it are highly correlated and that the United States has high levels of both crime and punishment, in part, because it suffers from a democratic deficit, rather than a surplus, in the production of fundamental collective goods, including risk of violence.