Exploring Political Legacies (Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy) 3030370054, 9783030370053

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BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE POLITICAL ECONOMY: SPERI RESEARCH & POLICY

Exploring Political Legacies Stephen Farrall Colin Hay Emily Gray

Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy Series Editor Colin Hay SPERI University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

The Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) is an innovation in higher education research and outreach. It brings together leading international researchers in the social sciences, policy makers, journalists and opinion formers to reassess and develop proposals in response to the political and economic issues posed by the current combination of financial crisis, shifting economic power and environmental threat. Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy will serve as a key outlet for SPERI’s published work. Each title will summarise and disseminate to an academic and postgraduate student audience, as well as directly to policy-makers and journalists, key policy-oriented research findings designed to further the development of a more sustainable future for the national, regional and world economy following the global financial crisis. It takes a holistic and interdisciplinary view of political economy in which the local, national, regional and global interact at all times and in complex ways. The SPERI research agenda, and hence the focus of the series, seeks to explore the core economic and political questions that require us to develop a new sustainable model of political economy at all times and in complex ways.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14879

Stephen Farrall • Colin Hay • Emily Gray

Exploring Political Legacies

Stephen Farrall University of Derby Derby, UK Emily Gray Department of Criminology University of Derby Derby, UK

Colin Hay Department of Politics University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy ISBN 978-3-030-37005-3    ISBN 978-3-030-37006-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37006-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the funding we have enjoyed from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) over the past recent years (as award numbers RES000222688, ES/K006398/1 and ES/ P002862/1) which has enabled us to explore the concept of a legacy with regards to the UK governments led by Margaret Thatcher from 1979 until 1990, and which has led to this publication. Our thinking has been stimulated and refined by the close working relationships we have enjoyed with Will Jennings (Southampton University) and Maria Grasso (Sheffield University), and we thank them both for their time and insights. Our colleagues at the universities we have worked at whilst pursuing this intellectual project (namely, Sheffield University, Sciences Po and Derby University) have also been supportive of our endeavours and we thank them all.

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Contents

1 Tracing the Past in the Present: Defining and Operationalising the Concept of Political Legacy 1 2 Political Generations and the Fear of Crime29 3 Housing Law, Household Victimisation and the Spatial Reconfiguration of Property Crime51 4 Rising Punitiveness in the English and Welsh Criminal Justice System73 5 Conclusion95 Index105

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About the Authors

Stephen Farrall  is Research Chair in Criminology in the Department of Criminology in the College of Business, Law and the Social Sciences at the University of Derby. He has held posts at the Universities of Oxford, Keele and Sheffield. In addition to his work on the long-term impacts of Thatcherism on UK society and crime, he is well known for his work on why people stop offending and on the fear of crime and the causes of this. Colin Hay  is Professor of Political Science (Professeur des Universités) in the Centre d’études européennes and Director of Doctoral School in Political Science at Sciences Po, Paris. He is Professor of Political Analysis in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK, and founding co-Director of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI). He has held visiting positions at Oxford, ANU, Harvard and MIT. He is the author of a number of books including, most recently, Dictionnaire d’économie politique (2019, with Andy Smith), (with D. Bailey, eds.) Diverging Capitalisms. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2019, The Coming Crisis (Palgrave, 2018, with Tom Hunt), Anti-Politics, Depoliticisation and Governance (2017, with Paul Fawcett et al.), Civic Capitalism (2015, with Anthony Payne) and The Legacy of Thatcherism (2014, with Stephen Farrall). He is perhaps best known for his prize-winning book Why We Hate Politics (2007) and for Political Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). He is editor of the journals New Political Economy, Comparative European Politics and British Politics and president of the European University Institute’s Research Council. He ix

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was chair of the UK Research Excellence Framework Sub-Panel for Politics and International Studies and is a fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. Emily Gray  is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Derby. She has held research posts at the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, Keele and Sheffield. Her work has focused on the intersection of crime, social policy and politics and testing the methodologies with which to assess these long-term patterns. Her broader research topics also include persistent offending and fear of crime. She is an academic advisor to the Youth Justice Board and Ministry of Justice.

Abbreviations

A/AS level Advanced Level/Advanced Supplement Level APC Age, Period and Cohort ASBO Anti-Social Behaviour Order BCS British Crime Survey (also known as the CSEW) BCS70 British Cohort Study (1970) BSAS British Social Attitudes Survey CPS Crown Prosecution Service CSE Certificate of Secondary Education CSEW Crime Survey for England and Wales (also known as the BCS) EU European Union GCSE General Certificate of Secondary Education GHS General Household Survey ID Identity LA Local Authority/Authorities NCDS National Child Development Study OED Oxford English Dictionary PACE Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) RTB Right to Buy (one’s council house) UK United Kingdom US/USA United States/United States of America

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Fig. 4.1

Total police recorded crime rate per 1000 head: England and Wales 1950–2012. (Data Source: Office of National Statistics 2012)34 Number of debates in which key words were discussed in Parliament (Hansard) per decade 1920–2005 (The last time period is limited to January 2000 to March 2005, when the data ceases) 38 Charting changes in state-backed punitiveness (1982–1998) 85

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2

Political generations 35 Independent variables recorded crime statistics (Adjusted for 1998/1999 rule change), Homicide 37 Table 2.3 Dependent variables 39 Table 2.4 Worry about burglary, mugging/robbery and theft of a car, APC logistic regression model 41 Table 2.5 Perceptions of problematic behaviour in local area: APC logistic regression model 43 Table 3.1 Summarising the key legislative changes in housing (1977–1989) 55 Table 3.2 Change in housing tenure 1982–1998 (BCS and BSAS, selected years) 58 Table 3.3 Measures of residualisation I: demographic data, 1982–1998 (BSC and BSAS, selected years) 61 Table 3.4 Measures of residualisation II: benefit recipients, 1986–1991 (BSAS)61 Table 3.5 Measures of residualisation III: unemployment, 1972–1994 (GHS, even years) 63 Table 3.6 Domestic property crimes by owners/mortgaged and renters (GHS)64 Table 3.7 Number of domestic property crimes by owners/mortgaged and renters (GHS) 65 Table 3.8 Domestic property crimes by owners/mortgaged and social renters (BCS) 65 Table 3.9 Number of domestic property crimes by owners/mortgaged and social renters (BCS) 66

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CHAPTER 1

Tracing the Past in the Present: Defining and Operationalising the Concept of Political Legacy

Abstract  The concept of the political legacy, despite its importance for institutionalist and historically minded political analysts more generally, remains both elusive and undeveloped theoretically. This chapter seeks to address that oversight by exploring the various ways in which political scientists have approached the legacy of Thatcherism and by building on existing studies of other politicians and their ideologies and policies. We aim to offer a clear definition and operationalisation of the term which might be used to inform future research. Legacies we view as traces of the past in the present; the claim to the existence of a legacy is both a causal and a counter-factual claim. We propose, in the light of this, a multi-­ dimensional approach to gauging political legacies, reflecting on some of the theoretical, analytical and methodological concerns which need to be addressed in establishing credible claims to their existence. Keywords  Legacy • Politics • History • Social change • Thatcherism What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.

—Pericles

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Farrall et al., Exploring Political Legacies, Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37006-0_1

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Introduction Making sense of political legacies is an important task in social scientific research. Identifying a legacy is part of the process of correctly attributing causality to a politician’s or administration’s ideas and activities. If done effectively it establishes the significance of historical factors in causal accounts which otherwise tend to be pre-occupied with the immediate antecedents of events. Increasingly, social scientists are aware of how previous states and conditions influence subsequent events and processes (Pierson 2004). Akin to the idea of ‘path dependency’ is that of ‘a legacy’—that is a trace of the past detectable in the present. Individual politicians, it would appear, are also motivated by the desire to leave a legacy and to be seen to have left a legacy, with two-thirds reporting that their legacy was of great importance to them (Fong et al. 2018: 28). In the case of individual politicians, the challenge of disentangling a legacy returns us to perennial issues of structure and agency. Legacies can have a strong hold on both subsequent political decision-making processes and whole regions of the globe (Wittenburg 2015). But yet, as Wittenburg notes, there is little consensus on how best to conceptualise and operationalise the notion of a legacy. Indeed, despite the growing influence of institutionalist theoretical reflections on temporality and path dependence (Pierson 2000), which strongly imply some notion of legacy, the concept remains theoretically unelaborated. This is perplexing and problematic in equal measure, given both the ubiquity of the term and the conceptual minefield that is immediately opened when one starts to reflect on the notion of a legacy. What does one need to do to establish credibly the claim that a legacy might be said to exist? Before proceeding further, then, it is important that we reflect on the concept and the methodological difficulties that its demonstration might pose. How legacies are operationalised varies from study to study. Fong et  al. (2018) note that the idea of political legacies is a relatively recent one in political science, hence perhaps the lack of clear guidance on how to define, operationalise or use this concept—far less, a sustained reflection on the methodological challenges it poses. The aim of this chapter is to begin to rectify that absence.

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What Is ‘a Legacy’? A legacy is, in effect, a trace in the present or future of the past.1 But it is not just any trace in the present or future of the past. It is the trace of something specific and singular (or, more accurately perhaps, something said to be specific and singular)—an event, a process, the interventions of an actor or actors, an ‘ism’, to give but a few examples. The claim that such a singularity (an event, an action, an ‘ism’) has a legacy is, in effect, a causal claim—that the effect in the present or future to which it has or might reasonably be seen to give rise is credibly caused by the thing itself and would not have happened (at least in the way in which it did) in the absence of that singularity. But, as the dictionary definitions of the term immediately reveal, this is in itself already quite a specific usage of the term. Dictionaries in English typically give a number of definitions of legacy. The first, in practically every case, is a bequest—“an amount of money or property left to someone in a will” in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for instance. The more general sense of a legacy as, again in the words of the OED, “something left or handed down by a predecessor” and, in the terms of the Collins Dictionary, “a direct result of an event or period … which continues to exist after it is over” is thus revealed to be analogical—equivalent or similar to the bequest of property, money or other assets between generations. Fong et al. (2018: 5) define a political legacy in the following way: We conceive of a political legacy as either a concrete policy achievement or a memory, feeling or idea that is associated with a politician and endures after she leaves office.

This definition is immediately suggestive as it identifies two ‘types’ of legacies: policy achievements and other tangible changes which Fong et al. refer to as ‘hard’ legacies (2018: 2) and ‘soft’ legacies (i.e. more abstract outcomes, such as shifts in attitudes). Although a definition is relatively easy to produce, as noted above, Wittenburg (2015) argues that there is little consensus as to how to conceptualise ‘a legacy’. Following a review of the literature on post-communist states, he argues that for an outcome to be described as a legacy, a number of components need to be demonstrated to exist. The first is the outcome itself. This needs to be i­ nexplicable 1

 An immediate effect may be better described as an impact, of course.

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(or not fully explicable) given the relevant contemporaneous factors. The second is the antecedent to this outcome. The third component is the causal mechanism. This explains how (and, it might be added, to what extent) the antecedent caused the outcome. It follows therefore that the legacy is the outcome to be explained. The outcome only qualifies as a legacy if it cannot be fully explained without reference to the antecedent (that is causal) factor. Second, argues Wittenburg (p.  369) an outcome only qualifies as a legacy if the antecedent causal factor ceased some time prior to the outcome emerging. In and of itself this is already helpful. For the further we stretch over time the concept of legacy, the greater the difficulty of establishing causation, and hence the greater the difficulty of establishing the credibility of the claim that a legacy exists. Crucially, it reminds us that the claim to the existence of a legacy is a form of counter-factual. In the absence of the causal effect to which the legacy is attributed, things would have turned out differently; the difference between the way they turned out and the way they would otherwise have turned out is the legacy. However, this, we contend, is no reason to abandon talk of legacies, even if it is a very good reason to reflect rather more systematically on the theoretic, analytic and methodological challenges inherent in establishing credibly claims of such a kind. For when it comes to the positing of what are, in effect, causal claims about the present in terms of the past, often in reference to relatively vaguely specified theoretical constructs, we are clearly entering terrain that is highly interpretively ambiguous. What might credibly be associated with a particular legacy is likely to vary between authors (as we shall see presently). Our Contribution This book explores the ways in the idea of a political legacy has been approached, focusing on the operationalisation of the concept. Having distilled lessons from the literature, we present a multi-dimensional approach to conceptualising and operationalising political legacies. We illustrate how some of these types of legacy can be operationalised through an examination of the legacy attributed to Margaret Thatcher and to Thatcherism more generally in this chapter. In the following three chapters, we then explore this issue at three levels of explanation via three exemplars. The first (discussed in Chap. 2) is at the individual level (wherein we explore the ways in which political leadership affects the sorts

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of crimes people worry about throughout their lives). The second exemplar (Chap. 3) deals with how legislation can affect households and communities and is achieved via a consideration of the role of housings and changes in this from 1980 to 2000, especially as these relate to victimisation rates. The third and final level of explanation we explore relates to national-level criminal justice acts and policies (Chap. 4). All three of our exemplars in some way relate to crime and criminal justice. This is not a coincidence. We focus on one policy area since we are able to show how a legacy may have several different facets which can be identified at various levels of explanation, namely micro, meso and macro levels even within that policy arena. Picking different policy areas would not allow us to make some of the connections about how legacies operate and become interlinked across levels of explanation (and might leave us open to the accusation of picking policy arena and case studies to fit the argument). Our final chapter explores some of the ways in which legacies can be researched by social scientist, political scientists and historians. Thatcher is an ideal leader to choose, since hers is a particularly well-documented period of leadership. Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear what ‘Thatcherism’ actually was (or is) and with what specific set of events, decisions, interventions and (potentially causal) processes it might be associated (Hay and Farrall 2011). Nor it is clear (indeed, far from it) that Thatcherism (however broadly understood) is the only credible factor which might be seen to generate the legacies typically attributed to it. And, on the effect-side of the balance sheet, things are no easier. For, with Thatcherism we are talking about effects that are likely to unfold incrementally over an extended period of time. In each and every one of these respects, the establishment of a legacy is methodologically difficult; arguably the more difficult the more interesting the analytic claim being made.

Existing Legacy Studies Here we focus on three broad groups of legacy studies, each with a different focus. We focus on how each legacy studied was conceptualised and operationalised. The first group of studies explore the legacies of recent US Presidents. These are seemingly powerful people, but ones who face various checks and balances on their power, not least of all the restriction of a maximum of two terms of office. The second group of studies deal with the legacies experienced by post-Soviet regimes. This provides an interesting contrast to the first group, since we are dealing with regimes

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which may have had several leaders and which lasted some 40–45 years, offering a different temporal dimension. The final group of studies focus on UK Prime Ministers. Like US Presidents, these people face several checks and balances to their powers, but unlike US Presidents, their terms of office are unlimited. The differences which each of these groups exhibit allow for a wide range of conceptualisations and operationalisations to be grappled with. This, then, extends the utility of the conclusions we reach with regards to the most useful ways of conceptualising and operationalising legacies and their points of register. Beland et  al. (2002) focus on Clinton’s period as US President (1993–2001). Their operationalisation of the concept of legacy focuses heavily upon his discourse (‘the third way’), legislation and the policies which stemmed from this (especially relating to social security and Medicare), and the impact of these (which they present as being limited in nature and scope). The study therefore focuses on ideas, legislation, policies and the outcomes produced. Jacobson (2001) also analyses Clinton’s legacy, but this time in terms of the socio-demographic groups most likely to have voted for him, and finds growing cultural and regional divides, which he attributes to the polarising nature of Clinton’s personality. As such the operationalisation of legacy here revolves around voting behaviour as a result of Clinton’s public persona. Hillygus and Jackman focussed on those voters who may have put off voting for Gore on account of their dislike of Clinton (2003: 592). This raises of the possibility of ‘negative’ legacies; those legacies which were the opposite of what had been intended. Shanks and Miller (1991) suggest that, in contrast, Bush Snr’s election success in 1988 was due to the electorate feeling positively towards Reagan, and hence a desire for the status quo, which Bush represented. McGuinn (2016) focuses on Obama’s legacy in terms of educational policies. In attempting to operationalise education legacies, McGuinn focuses on legislative processes, policies and their implementation. So soon after Obama had left office, it was hardly surprising that he concluded that it was hard to ascertain what the impacts might be (p. 408). This, of course, raises a crucial question: at which point after a politician has ceased to hold office can one expect to detect legacies? Van De Walle (2009) examined the legacy which the Bush and Obama presidencies had on US policies towards Africa. Here legacies are discussed in terms of foreign aid policies, thereby bringing an important spatial element to thinking about the ‘location’ of legacies. Legacies are not, of course, solely domestic affairs.

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Fong et al. (2018) explore the legacies of a number of US Presidents and other political leaders (Speakers of the House, Senate Majority Leaders, Secretaries of State and so on). They focus on the extent to which they are recalled by members of the public after they have left office, have their Wikipedia websites visited and edited, are invoked in current debates, and themselves desire to leave a legacy of some sort. They introduce the distinction between ‘hard’ (policy) and ‘soft’ (discursive) legacies, finding that non-Presidents tend to have shorter legacies than Presidents (2018: 9), and that whilst many former politicians have hard legacies, only Presidents have soft legacies. Hard legacies tend to shape the longevity of soft legacies (2018: 32). As one might imagine, the collapse of the former-Soviet states has attracted much interest in terms of analysing the legacies which they left. Hanson (1995: 310) suggests that the Leninist legacy needs to be broken down into four forms of legacy (namely ideological, political, socioeconomic and cultural). Geddes (1995) adds to this subdivision institutional legacies. Chen (2003), in a detailed examination of Romania, demonstrates that the ‘illiberal’ attitudes common amongst many former-Soviet states was a legacy of the Leninist approach to nation-building, which generated hostility towards cultural minorities. This body of work, taken as a whole, points to the importance of unravelling cultural legacies which may manifest themselves in terms of social attitudes amongst members of the publics in these former-Soviet states, and the institutions which are developed in the light of these attitudes. UK Prime Ministers have also been the subject of several assessments of their legacies. Annesley et al. (2010) explore the extent to which the New Labour governments (1997–2010) were able to promote greater inclusion of females in political representation, governance and policy. Their operationalisation focuses on the extent to which New Labour increased both the representation of females in politics and their ability to operate on an equal footing with males. Their analyses describe the institutional aspects of female equality (such as the creation of the position of Minister for Women and Equality), policy developments (such as promoting gender equality in a range of public bodies and extending paid and unpaid maternity leave), and the impacts of these policies. They conclude that the successes were limited due to the framing of the issues by feminist activists, the constraints imposed by the core executive, the male-dominated policy-­ making process, and the neo-liberal economic agenda which underpinned New Labour’s approach and limited what could be imagined. As such

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their approach to operationalising the concept of ‘a legacy’ relates to institutions, policies and impacts. Heffernan (2011) chooses to focus on the legacy left by Blair and Brown’s periods in office, and points out two immediate legacies. The first is the faltering economy, and the second is the electoral and ideational problems with which Ed Milliband (the subsequent Labour leader) needed to grapple (see also Green 2010 on Thatcher’s legacy for the Conservative Party). In turn, the New Labour legacy demanded the ‘compassionate’ approach adopted by David Cameron, Conservative Party leader from 2005. Coates’s (2008) discussion deals with Brown, but focuses on his period as Chancellor rather than Prime Minister. Legacy here is operationalised in terms of both policies and impacts in both the short and long term (such as levels of unemployment, poverty, houses built and the creation of ‘baby bonds’ for children born in the UK between 2002 and 2010). Peele (2018) discusses the legacy of British MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Powell is an interesting case, since he was never Prime Minister, the highest post he held being Minister for Health (1960–1963). Peele identifies three legacies (of course there were immediate additional impacts, not least of all Powell’s sacking): immigration was transformed into a topic for political debate, meaning that it could no longer be ignored; signalling to the UK’s ethnic minorities that the Conservative Party was not their natural home (an issue which David Cameron had to work hard at to challenge); and the sense that UK politicians frequently failed to address the needs and concerns of ordinary citizens. Hayton (2018) focuses on the ideological legacy left by David Cameron’s decision to call a referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. Hayton considers Cameron’s legacy in terms of the Conservative Party’s attitude towards the EU (concluding that Cameron served only to further entrench divisions), the state of the Union of nations which the UK represents (which he served only to further weaken), and the divide between social liberals and conservative traditionalists inside the Conservative Party (which he failed to make many inroads to—the party remaining socially conservative). Hayton’s work views legacies as being a mix of ideology, policies (such as gay marriage or immigration targets), legislation, events and impacts (the extent to which these produced the outcomes desired). Hayton concludes that Cameron’s attempt to change the ideological stance of the party did not succeed.

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The ‘Special Case’ of Margaret Thatcher’s Legacy? Let us turn now to those explorations of Margaret Thatcher’s period as UK Prime Minister (1979–1990). Hers is a unique case, since she was in power for over 11 years and attracted a considerable degree of attention from academics and commentators. This diversity and breadth of analysis means that there have been several attempts to explore her legacy from a range of perspectives (political science, sociology, public policy and historical). Jessop (2015: 28) usefully reminds us that “how one estimates the legacies of Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism depends on one’s reference point and focus”. In the case of Thatcher, her discourse represented a critique of those social, economic and political developments which she, and those for whom she spoke, felt had left the UK in a weakened situation. This discourse revolved around concepts and terms including choice, enterprise, community, value for money, families, freedom, standards in public services, public spending, taxation levels, individual responsibility and inflation (see Phillips 1998). Hay (1996, Table 11) reminds us that Thatcherism was a mix of both neo-liberalism and neo-conservativism, and that policy activity was stronger when these coalesced into an agreed policy direction. As such ideas and discourses do not simply motivate action, but push some actions (and hence, possible outcomes and therefore legacies too) up the agenda relative to other potential actions. Ideas, as we shall discuss below, can also work their way into other politicians’ and political parties’ discourses. In the case of Thatcher, the importance of families, homeownership and normative heterosexuality were placed firmly on the agenda (trade union reform and levels of taxation were also emphasised). Other sections of society (manual labourers, benefit claimants, council tenants, single mothers, ethnic minorities, ‘gays’ and trade unionists) found that their interests were not represented, or that they were presented in a pejorative manner. In Thatcher’s case, those highlighted as legitimate (and therefore whose voices were given additional weight) included the police, ‘entrepreneurs’, businesses and ‘business leaders’, homeowners and workers, whilst welfare ‘scroungers’, the poor, single-mothers and people of ‘different cultures’ who were ‘swamping’ the country were identified as delegitimised subjects. During the 1980s, news social groups emerged as a consequence of the social and economic changes. This led to the creations of new processes of labelling such groups. Until the 1980s, for example, young people in the UK earning extremely high incomes derived

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from work in the financial marks (‘yuppies’) were unheard of. Similarly, middle-career workers who had been made redundant and were unable to find work were uncommon. In the case of ‘Thatcherite’ social attitudes and values, a number of recent studies have suggested that those who came of age during Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister appear to support values she endorsed. Tilley (2005: 451), for example, reports that the UK was becoming more socially liberal during the twentieth century. However, during the 1980s, this trend was halted, only starting again in the late 1990s (Figure 1, p. 446). There were also reverses to the decline in national pride during this time, especially amongst those who came of age during the 1980s and early 1990s (Tilley and Heath 2007: 669). Similarly, Grasso et al. (2017) find that those people who came of age during Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister held more right-authoritarian political values compared to other political generations when it came to topics such as wealth redistribution, welfare spending and dealing with lawbreakers. These studies suggest that the long-term shaping of public opinion through political socialisation is one of the legacies of Thatcherism. Some of the earliest forays into the impact of Thatcherism focused on attitudinal changes (Crewe 1989). Crewe asked “has the electorate become Thatcherite?”, to which he answered “no”, pointing out that by some analyses the population was taking a ‘hard line’ on some issues before 1979 and that by 1987 was actually showing quite anti-Thatcherite sentiments. Crewe and Searing (1988) argued that there was little evidence that her ideology had gained much popular support, although there were some signs that significant blocks such as the Monday Club had started to share some of the pillars of Thatcherism. When it came to a consideration of the extent to which Thatcherite thinking was shared by the electorate, most of the dimensions of Thatcherism identified by Crewe and Searing suggested that the electorate had shifted little or become less Thatcherite (1988: 376). McAllister and Mughan (1987) also found that there had been “little fundamental change in the electorate’s overall attitudinal structure” (1987: 47). In short, initial shifts in attitudes which might become a legacy did not appear to be in evidence by the late 1980s. However, more recent studies using data sets which encompass greater periods of time and more nuanced analysis techniques (such as age, period and cohort analyses, Grasso et  al. 2017) have suggested that attitudinal effects can be detected for those who grew up during Thatcher’s period in office. These more recent studies provide evidence that the social attitudinal legacy of Thatcherism may

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have taken several decades to emerge, partly due to processes of political socialisation, which is a processes which is generally considered to last years. Chief amongst the early work on the Thatcherite legacy is Marsh and Rhodes’ edited collection (1992a) which deals not simply with legislative activity, but with the much more complex and difficult work of implementation. Their approach forces one to consider the extent to which legislation and the policies which flowed from it was in keeping with Thatcherite ideals (rather than simply being passed or developed between 1979 and 1990). Their approach to the operationalisation of the concept of a legacy embraces ideas, legislation and crucially the implementation of legislation. Gamble (1996) focuses on a number of broad legacies which he detects from Thatcher’s period in office. The first of these, which he refers to as the external legacy, relates to UK-US relations, which bloomed under Thatcher and Reagan’s periods in office. This, he argues, came at the cost of relations with the EU and its member states (p. 19). The second legacy Gamble identifies is the political legacy. This refers to a number of processes, including the dominance of the Conservative Party over opposition parties and the weakening of the Scots ‘buy-in’ to the Union. Although the UK Constitution was broadly unchanged (p.  22), its stability was undermined by the Conservative Party’s dominance and their strongly centralist style of government (from London, a point made also by Jenkins 2007). Thatcher did little directly to change the constitution, although both Scotland and Wales (as a result of their dislike of the consequences of Westminster rule and English national pride, Tilley and Heath 2007: 674–5, which they felt were damaging their countries and those living in them) saw increases in calls for independence and devolved government, the latter of which happened under New Labour. Such calls for constitutional change started as, and can be detected in, social attitudinal data (Tilley and Heath 2007). A question to explore is the extent to which subsequent administrations pushed back against the reforms (were they able to?), and the extent to which the reforms made were reversible. Or perhaps, did governments ‘buy into’ the changes? To some extent, any subsequent changes are partly dependent upon incoming governments being able to construct an alternative discourse which articulates and legitimises any reversals (Phillips 1998). The economic legacy, Gamble’s third Thatcherite legacy (1996), was associated with deindustrialisation and rising unemployment, and the discourse around economics, which shifted from a focus on national ­economic

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management and protectionism to a free, open and global economy, with little regulation and low taxes. The Thatcher governments also created a general social attitude of hostility towards welfare dependents (p. 26), as well, of course, as moving away from the commitment to full employment. To this list Gamble (2015) adds the exacerbation of the problems of welfare dependency, achieved via the creation of a class of unemployable people who could not be (re)absorbed into the ranks of the employed. The other significant legacy of Thatcherism, argues Gamble (1996), was the change in the political values of the Labour Party, which moved to embrace individualism, choice and market mechanisms (Heffernan 2000), although as Green (2010: 186) notes, Labour initially moved leftwards. Farrall and Hay’s edited collection on the legacy of Thatcherism (2014) contains a number of chapters which deal with the legacies of Thatcherism in distinct policy domains. Chapters dealing with the economy, the social security system, schooling, housing policies, families, the criminal justice system, social and economic inequalities touch on a range of types of outcomes in these fields. As such, the chapter authors operationalise the legacies they detect in terms of policy outcomes, ideological positions, political ‘machinery’, organisation structures, policy positions of other parties, the standing of some professions, legislation, institutions, the desire to be inclusive during policy making, constitutional matters, policy agendas, access to and/or the distribution of resources, discourses, and changes in and to spatial configurations of these. This collection suggests, in keeping with Hay (1996), that Thatcherism’s structural legacy will be significant. Nunn (2014) identifies four long-term legacies of Thatcherism. The first of these was the transformation on mainstream party competition and the creation of the New Labour project (see also Heffernan 2000), although both Hayton (2018) and Heffernan (2011: 174) note that her period as leader left troublesome legacies for subsequent leaders of the Conservative Party to deal with. The second outcome identified by Nunn is the creation of the neo-liberal individual, who is part-citizen, part-­ consumer. In this version of the project of the self, advancement is made via the possession of material goods as part of a wider possessive individualism. ‘Social mobility’ therefore before becomes an individual, rather than a collective, goal. The third legacy which Nunn identifies is the de-­ industrialisation experienced by the UK during the 1980s and the dependence on the financial sector, although as Nunn notes, de-industrialisation can be traced back to the 1950s. The final long-term outcome which Nunn identifies is the fracturing of the working class. Other recent studies

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(e.g. Shipton et al. 2013) suggest that ill health and alcohol-related mortality increased amongst those social groups most marginalised during Thatcher’s period in office. Dorling (2014: 266) illustrates how this had an uneven impact in terms of ethnicity. Margaret Thatcher’s governments damaged the strength of the trade union movement in the UK, and served to strengthen the power of employers and private sector organisations. Of course, organisational change is not the only markers we ought to be interested in; as Pierson reminds us, organisation development is equally important (2004: 133). Dorling (2014) notes how economic prosperity became concentrated in southern towns and within those existing enclaves of wealth, resulting in a clear division into ‘safe’ Labour and ‘safe’ Tory seats (pp. 256–9), as well as depopulating northern counties (p. 262). Such changes may also find expression in social attitudes which vary by region, as found by Johnson and Pattie (1990) in the case of Thatcherism. In some cases, it is apparent that legacies can relate to relationships with other countries. The UK and the USA, for example, saw a closer relationship during the Thatcher-­ Reagan era and again during the Clinton-Blair era and Bush-Blair era. In some cases, the legacies are of poorer relationships, such as, in the case of the UK, poorer relations with the EC/EU during and after Thatcherism. Jessop (2015) notes a number of legacies of Thatcherism, including the rise of the conviction politician; the promotion of the free market, deregulation, privatisation of State-owned utilities and the introduction of market proxies in the State sector; reductions in direct taxation and the growth of internationalisation. Each of these represents both policies and legislative activities (p. 24). Marsh and Akram (2015: 55) point to the legacies of Thatcherism as changes in fiscal policies and legislative constraints on trade unions, but question the extent to which she changed social values (citing Crewe’s work, see above) and the extent to which there was an ‘economic miracle’ attributable to Thatcher’s policies (p. 57). Smith (2015) highlights Thatcher’s role in undermining the broad policy framework and politically institutionalised rules which emphasised the need for conciliation and consensus (p.  65). While careful not to unquestioningly accept the idea of a post-war consensus, Smith argues that Thatcher’s administrations started the process of re-visioning the responsibilities of the State and whose interests it ought to serve (p. 69). Similarly, her approach has meant, he argues, that subsequent governments have been able to change employment and welfare policies without having to enter into negotiations with affected parties (p. 76). As such, the

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idea that concessions needed to be made to various sections of society was removed from the political calculus. In a similar fashion, Green (2010: 193–4) argues that Thatcher transformed the institutional terrain of politics such that trade unions and local governments saw their power reduced, a phobia of paying taxes emerged, and the State withdrew from any meaningful management of the economy. Dorey (2014) focuses on levels of economic inequality as the main legacy of Thatcherism. This was achieved via a mix of ideology and discourse (which asserted that levels of wealth were a result of degrees of effort, and as such legitimate, p. 81) and a series of policies and legislation (such as income tax cuts, curbing trade union powers and various efforts to reduce the economic worth of social security payments) which sought to increase levels of inequality. New Labour, he points out, focused on tackling poverty and social exclusion, rather than tackling inequality, which he cites as a legacy of Thatcherism. In Thatcher’s case, the prioritisation of inflation over unemployment became institutionalised (Thompson 2014: 58), with Gordon Brown setting guidelines for inflation, but not for unemployment. Thatcher also managed to institutionalise ‘the consumer’ and ‘the market’ in many spheres of life and thinking, and the idea of the ‘underclass’ for a period of time in the 1980s and 1990s (Hill and Walker 2014: 97). Consensual politics and the search for economic equality were pushed off the agenda, whilst privatisation and a concern with profitability were placed on the agenda. More recently still, Farrall et al. (2016a, b) explore the impact of various social and economic policies on crime and the criminal justice system. Farrall et al. (2016a) argue that the crime increases during the 1980s led to an increase in punitiveness in the criminal justice system (e.g. in terms of longer prison sentences and more onerous community disposals). Farrall et al. (2016b) explore the impact of the Housing Act from 1980 on property crime in the social rented and owner-occupied housing sectors. They find that the socially rented sector became progressively more residualised after 1980s, with increasing proportions of residents drawn from poorer sections of society. This attracted crime to estates which had previously been relatively low crime areas (Murie 1997; Farrall et al. 2016b). Associated with this was an increase in property crimes in both housing tenures explored, but a faster and higher increase was experienced by those in the socially rented sector, which, when the crime decline came in the early 1990s, also experienced a slower decline. The 1980 Housing Act, in effect, altered access to a key resource (council housing) for many people

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who, in the absence of available council housing, were forced to turn to the private rented market or to buy homes of their own (or to living on the streets—a phenomenon which grew dramatically during the 1980s). Those who could access council housing became increasingly drawn from the most-needy sections of society, making the estates places in which it was harder to maintain good order. These studies point to the ways in which social and economic policy changes in one area of activity can produce ‘knock-on’ effects for other social policy areas, albeit several years later.

Developing a Multi-Dimensional Approach to Gauging Political Legacies Let us now summarise what we have learnt from the above, and outline a multi-dimensional approach to gauging political legacies. A number of observations can be made about how the various conceptualisations and operationalisations of ‘a legacy’ have been dealt with so far. The conceptualisations which we have reviewed above differ from one another along various lines. For example, some deal with individual legacies (those of a particular politician) whilst others dealt with legacies of more collective entities or processes which might be seen to have transcended the influence of any one politician (e.g. the Former-Soviet States or, indeed, the ideology of Thatcherism). In some cases, legacies are related to continuing or embedding a process started by others (e.g. in Chen’s study of Caucestau’s rule of Romania 2003), whilst in other cases it is the nature and degree of radicalism which is the subject of the analyses. One of the obvious aspects of the study of legacies is that it is almost exclusively focused on politicians who held high political office (Presidents and Prime Ministers most obviously) and is concerned chiefly with their time as leader. Exceptions to this are Coate’s study of Gordon Brown’s period as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Peele’s study of Enoch Powell. This is hardly surprising, of course, since having a legacy implies having had the power to influence events. Nevertheless, these studies remind us that some non-leaders are also able to shape events to the extent that a discernible legacy becomes apparent. Non-leaders, however, tend to have ‘narrower’, more focused arenas of influence, whilst leaders tend to have legacies which span across several policy arenas. This highlights another distinction we found in the literature; between politicians whose legacy relates to a

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period of holding office compared to those whose legacy relates to one episode (e.g. Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech). Our review also throws up additional questions which need to be grappled with. For example, one needs to decide how long it takes to produce a legacy and how long a legacy might endure. These are issues to which precise answers cannot be provided, since this will depend on the extent to which the political systems and the agents which operate in it are willing and able to support the changes being proposed and made and the extent to which subsequent events and agents act in terms of ossifying the embryonic legacy. This further raises what one might refer to as the ‘limiters’ of a legacy. These are those individuals, organisations, institutions or processes which deliberately or unconsciously prevent a legacy from being established or which degrade its impact once it has been established. Legacies in the literature which we reviewed were mainly what might be termed ‘positive’; that is the politician set out to do something, which they achieved and which then had an impact. Alternative legacies may include, for example, attempting to achieve a goal but producing the opposite of what was intended (see Hillygus and Jackman 2003 on Clinton), or deliberately choosing not to intervene in a process or in response to an event. Additionally, a legacy may be conceptualised in terms of removing certain issues from a policy or political agenda. In terms of the ways in which the concept of a legacy was operationalised, we found that all of the following sorts of processes and outcomes were used although no one author used all in their studies. We contend that in order to produce a full assessment of an individual politician or an ideological stance, one would need to consider all of these (if only in some instances to rule them out): • The legacy of ideas, discourses and critiques: often these relate to key parts of the philosophy which underpinned the legacy being assessed. Ideas about what constitutes a good society or an efficient economy were based on either a leader’s own ideas or an amalgam of ideas which they adopted from other thinkers. Such ideas may be used to support arguments both during the time the politician was in power and by others afterwards (Fong et al. 2018). Ideas, discourses and critiques in turn motivate policy goals, legislation and policies, implementation and, indeed, interpretations of the outcomes of these initiatives.

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• Legacies as traces in social attitudes: deciding which social attitudes change prior to the election of a politician and which are the consequence of that period in office is not an easy task. Nevertheless, more recent analytic and methodological innovation, such as age period and cohort analyses, do offer the hope that such assessments might be possible. Some politicians may produce a discourse which becomes so heavily engrained in societal and political institutions that it shapes the belief systems of voters. Such assessments may need to wait years before the data is available for a thorough assessment to be made. Nevertheless, it may be that politicians are able to influence wider social attitudes and values such that these develop to support the promulgation of political their ideas. Age, period and cohort analysis techniques hold much promise in this regard (as we show in Chap. 2 and discuss further in Chap. 5). • Legislative legacies: closely related to policy legacies (see below) are actual legislation (Acts of parliament). These shape and mandate various policy initiatives. Legislation may later be repealed or may be ‘built upon’ and consolidated. Similarly, some legislation lies dormant on statutes for years or decades only to be enacted later (or to remain unused). Legislation which becomes a ‘flagship’ part of their policy agenda may become part of popular consciousness and the collective memory of that politician. • Policy legacies: these relate to both policies which are enacted when in power (e.g. via directives from government departments) or policies which are stated but never acted upon either because the party backing them does not gain power (e.g. in the case of policies outlined in a manifesto), or they gain power but the policies are never pursued (which might be for a number of reasons). Policies may have numerous outcomes and may remain in place for several years or longer. Policies adopted by a subsequent administration or politician (especially if acknowledged as having been used by the earlier politician) may serve to cement both the policies and the ideas and so on with which they were originally associated (reinforcing ‘soft’ legacies identified by Fong et al. 2018). A politician’s legacy in the popular imagination may also be furthered by the adoption of policies associated with them by others. With regards to the impact of both legislation and a set of policies which flow from it, these can be approached in a number of ways. The first

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of these is in terms of the behaviours of key social actors and also of citizens. Do key social actors (e.g. solicitors, medical practitioners, police officers, local government employees, business leaders) in positions of power (even low levels) change behaviour? Do such changes alter the behaviours of others (such as citizens)? Secondly, the impact may also be thought of in terms of the distribution of key resources in society. Do the policies being enacted change the access to key resources? How does this change the distribution of power and resources in a society both immediately and over time? Attention to the assessment of legislation and policies is therefore required. • Constitutional legacies: if a political leader or party aims to (and is able to) change their nation’s constitution, then this may well become a key part of the legacy of their period in power, since constitutional changes are often rare (depending on the political system in question) and may shape or limit the abilities of subsequent actors. • Legacies for socio-demographic groups: legacies for social groups can be tremendously varied in their nature and scope. In the literature we have considered, we see examples of voting preferences of groups cited as a legacy. Additionally, the differential resources allocated to social groups is another example of how legacies were secured. Degrees of social inclusion or exclusion in political and social processes are also seen to leave long-term traces. Similarly, the standing and reputation of particular social groups was another operationalisation, as was the extent to which this social group was ‘fractured’ or not. • Organisational legacies: in the literature we reviewed, organisational legacies referred to the sorts of formal organisations which existed in a political system and their inter-relationships and dependencies. These might be parts of the machinery of government and international political organisations, or these might be other organisations not formally involved in politics at all. Analysts need to ask how such organisations support the goals of those who established them, and the roles which they play ideologically and discursively. • Institutional legacies: these legacies, on the other hand, refer to norms about how politics is conducted. This might, for example, refer to how collective decision making is undertaken (including who is to be consulted during decision making, and how much weight is given to their input) and the tenor of these debates, if they

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are conciliatory or if there is no attempt made to reach a consensus. Political scientists need therefore to assess how the existing institutions (political, social, cultural etc.) in a society change both contemporaneously and over time. For example, they need to assess the extent to which any new institutions and the changes to existing institutions become embedded over time. That is, do they became part of the ‘new normal’? • Legacies for political parties (both one’s own and the opposition parties): the legacies included were often conceptualised in terms of the problems faced by political parties. This included, for example, party unity, declining membership and the need to shift a party’s ideological stance on an issue as external events dictated. Often opposition parties were initially affected, but the party which the leader was associated with may also undergo periods of difficult transitions when that leader stepped down. • Spatial legacies (including those for other countries/relationships with or between other countries): spatial legacies work in a number of ways. It could be that a politician is able to produce profound political changes which affect the relationships between two or more countries (e.g. a war, or the ending of hostilities or the brokering of a peace deal between combatants). In other cases, a politician may produce structural changes in the country which they are leader of, but which have an even geographical effects, such that some areas of the country prosper, whilst others suffer. Given that economic conditions are associated with a number of other life outcomes, some areas may see further legacies in terms of increases in health, employment and educational success, whilst others experience greater levels of ‘worklessness’ (or underemployment), poor health and lower levels of school attendance. • Legacies in terms of popular issues which are transformed (brought on to or pushed off political agendas): we have already cited several examples of issues which were pushed off or brought onto agendas of various ilk. In some instances, a politician might have been able to attract interest to a particular policy issue (policy entrepreneurs in Kingdon 1995’s terms); in other cases, they may have been able to ensure that a particular topic was taken off the agenda. • Legacies in terms of the creation and identification of social groups/‘types’ of individuals: politicians can help to create new social groups in a number of ways. One way may extend via the discursive creation of a

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new ‘type’ of politician; a politician who is a ‘strong leader’, ‘knows their own mind’; has a vision of what has to be done and is able to lead others along the route to that. By mimicking that style of leadership themselves, a politician may create a template for others to copy in their own pursuit of success. Alternatively, a politician’s policies may create the conditions for the emergence or flourishing of new social groups. • Legacies in terms of the (de)legitimising of particular topics and people: politicians, with their frequent access to media outlets are able to influence at a discursive level which particular topics and which particular social groups are perceived to be ‘legitimate’ and those which are not. Indeed, politicians are able at some level to decide if they even wish to single out particular topics and groups for attention. In these ways politicians can (de or re)legitimatise some sections of society. The above are all ways in which a legacy (whether that of a political actor, movement or ideology) may be operationalised so as to became readily identifiable in empirical study. However, the operationalisation of the concept of a legacy requires that one also bears the following in mind when coming to a conclusion about the likely extent and impact of a particular legacy: • Implementation: Producing legislation and policies based upon it is one matter, but implementing these in such a way as to produce the desired outcomes is another. For these reasons, when we are assessing a politician’s possible legacy, we need to attend to the ways in which the policies designed to turn the legislation into action in the real world are actually enacted at ‘street level’. Thinking about how to turn the ideas in the legislation into policies may take different forms in different places and at different times. In addition, even if the same policy is operationalised in the same way in all places, there may well still be differences due to strategic interests of some actors, resistance to the initial ideas in one place which are not encountered in others, and other contingencies. In this way, a full assessment of a politician’s legacy needs to take into account the processes of implementation and the ways in which these may alter the potential and nature of any outcomes. If implementation goes extremely badly, it

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is possible to imagine that the actual legacy is quite different from what was intended. • Timeframe: Expressed ideas (and indeed, legislation and policies) do not always bear fruit (or may do so only slowly). Making an assessment of a politician’s legacy means, ultimately, accepting that it may take very many years for a set of ideas and/or the legislation and policies which flow from them to alter in any way the social and economic world. Several electoral cycles may have to pass before legacies fully emerge. This raises the possibility of a set of ideas, legislation and policies producing initial outcomes (t1) which are different to those produced at t2 (and in turn those at t3 and t4), meaning that one needs to think about both initial and long-term legacies. Farrall et  al. (2016b) suggest that it took around 15–20  years for the changes brought on by the 1980 Housing Act to result in council housing estates becoming increasingly dangerous places for the tenants, reinforcing a suggestion of Pierson’s that a conservative government’s main impact on the welfare system may be felt a decade or more after they had left office (2004: 88, see Chap. 4). The timeframe of impact may be stretched in other ways too. If a leader attracts likeminded, but much younger, individuals to the party they lead, then their discursive legacy may stretch over two or more generations of politicians. In the case of Thatcher, many of her contemporaries did not share her ideological position (many were ‘Heath’s men’). However, her ideas attracted a number of younger politicians into the Conservative Party, and hence one aspect of the Thatcherite legacy was the dominance of some key government departments after she had left office. For example, Michael Howard, Peter Lilley, Michael Portillo and Norman Lamont all gained high political office only after Thatcher had stepped down in 1990. • Countervailing policies: it may be that in some cases, legislation and the policies which stem from them may work against one another (Marsh and Rhodes 1992a). For example, the desire to reduce the overall social security budget and the desire to make the economy more responsive to the needs of the free market under the Thatcher governments worked in such a way that the UK social security budget increased rather than decreased. Rising unemployment, coupled at that time with a (initially) generous welfare system, meant that that social security spending increased dramatically during the 1980s. This then necessitated changes to the social security system in order

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to make it less generous and hence to bring down the total spend. It therefore follows that quite careful process tracing needs to be undertaken in order to make full assessments of a government’s legacy. • Poor Legislation or policies may reduce or negate desired outcomes, or produce undesired outcomes: it is not always the case that the legislation passed produces the intended policy or distributive changes intended. If the legislation is based on information which is out of date, or if events in the social world move quickly, it might be the case that the legislation does not produce the desired outcomes. It is always worth bearing in mind the fact that politics sometimes does not progress smoothly or evenly, and that there may be some actors and organisations who work to modify the intended outcomes. In Thatcher’s case, the 1983–1987 administration is often seen as a ‘lost’ administration; expecting to lose the 1983 general election, the 1983 manifesto was de-radicalised, meaning that the second administration was much less radical than, for example, either the first or third administrations. During her first administration, Thatcher had to give some power to the ‘Wets’,2 who repeatedly plotted against her. In some cases, the policies may interact with organisations and institutions in such a way as to produce unintended or counter-­ intuitive consequences. Some institutions will work to support the establishment of a legacy, but others may work against this. • Labelling is important: the labels which are applied to ideas may change over time, meaning that discourses need to be read and interpreted carefully. It may be the case that an idea is stripped of one label and relabelled with another term in order to make it more palatable. For example, the idea of requiring UK residents to show ID Cards in order to obtain access to medical and social care (an idea raised by David Blunkett whilst Home Secretary) underwent relabelling (to ‘Entitlement Cards’) when the original formulation was criticised. Similarly, some of the ideas developed by Thatcher’s governments were sketched by Heath’s government and labelled ‘The Seldon Man’. The labels were changed, but the ideas were similar (even if in the case of the Entitlement Cards they were never pursued). • Different politicians operate in different political and legal systems: different political and legal systems afford different opportunities to 2  ‘The Wets’: those in the Conservative Party who opposed Thatcher’s monetarist policies and cuts to public spending, and who were often supporters of her predecessor Ted Heath.

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encourage or stifle radicalism. The USA, for example, has a two-term limit for Presidents, meaning that the longest any one individual is able to hold Presidential powers is eight years. The US State system means that State Governors hold the power for much legislation relating to law and order, education and public health. The UK has no formal system limiting the times an individual can be Prime Minister, and Westminster holds power over local governments at the county level, meaning that Prime Ministers may hold more ‘domestic’ powers than is the case when compared to US Presidents. New Zealand has a unicameral system meaning that once a government is elected with a reasonable majority, they (potentially) can make very radical changes very quickly with a relatively low level of resistance. The unicameral system in New Zealand has been cited as one explanation as to why it was that New Zealand embarked on radical right policies very quickly in the 1970s. The changes introduced by the New Zealand Labor Party from 1984 were far-reaching, overturning 60 years of state intervention (Nagel 1988: 221). In other cases, some political systems have policies which enable senior politicians to appoint others to posts for life (e.g. US Presidential appointments to the Supreme Court), meaning that a legacy can be ensured via appointment. • Radicals might produce more easily detectable legacies: a legacy may be easier to detect when the project associated with it is radical, since radicalism represents a greater degree of change from what went before. This idea is important to bear in mind, since it raises important questions about how one detects ‘non-’ or simply less radical legacies. Radical legacies may be more easily detected simply because of their tendency to make breaks with the past, meaning that the causal chains of influence may be shorter simply because the new policies are such a break from what went before. Less radical policies may have causal chains which stretch years or decades back making claims of such policies belonging to a particular politician’s period in office harder to substantiate. Nevertheless, it may be that a politician did still have a legacy in terms of reinforcing and/or extending existing policies to new social groups. Another way in which a non-radical political legacy may emerge is in relation to a threat from a radical set of policies which the non-radical politician is able to resist. In this sense the survival of the existing paradigm in the face of the threat

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from the radical is a legacy; had their resistance failed, the policy agenda may have shifted in a radical direction.

Conclusion In the preceding discussion we have sought to review how others have approached a developing concept in political science, that of a political legacy. Having reviewed the existing literature on this literature, we have sought to identify a multi-dimensional approach to gauging political legacies, noting the various ways in which this concept could be operationalised, and some of the keys issues which also need to be borne in mind when assessing a legacy. One final point is perhaps also worth adding; it is important to reflect on the relationship between the establishment of the credibility of a legacy claim empirically and theories of political change. Here we follow the argument of earlier work on the legacy of Thatcherism (Hay and Farrall 2011) to suggest the value of using the empirical demonstration of a legacy of a particular kind as a test of a theoretical proposition as to the existence of a causal entity such as Thatcherism. In their work on Thatcherism, they suggest the value of inverting conventional attempts at periodisation which typically proceed from the presumption of the existence of the political project itself. In contrast to such approaches, they suggest the value of attempting to gauge the periodisability of the putative project in question. This can be done by treating as open and empirical the question of whether a political project (such as Thatcherism) can be said to exist and by seeking to establish this by gauging the extent to which the development of policy over time in distinct policy fields exhibits a common rationale applied consistently over time. Such an approach seeks to discern the periodisability of political projects as a means of establishing their existence as political projects, by assessing the credibility of the claim that might have left a political legacy. Such an approach requires the analyst to set out, deductively, what the periodisation of a political project and its policy legacy might entail, before seeking to construct, inductively, a series of periodisations of key policy domains. The aim in so doing is to assess the degree to which it is possible (and useful) to see these as exhibiting a common rationale and as arising from the development of a common entity—something which might warrant the label ‘Thatcherism’ and which might itself be periodisable. In short, the existence of Thatcherism itself is gauged by testing the claim that something resembling its legacy

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can be identified. This we see as perhaps the best use of the concept of political legacy for illuminating long-term political change.

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Hay, C. (1996). Restating Social and Political Change. Milton Keynes: Oxford University Press. Hay, C., & Farrall, S. (2011). Establishing the Ontological Status of Thatcherism by Gauging Its ‘Periodisability’: Towards a ‘Cascade Theory’ of Public Policy Radicalism. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 13(4), 439–458. Hayton, R. (2018). British Conservatism After the Vote for Brexit. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 20(1), 223–238. Heffernan, R. (2000). New Labour and Thatcherism. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Heffernan, R. (2011). Labour’s New Labour Legacy. Political Studies Review, 9, 163–177. Hill, M., & Walker, A. (2014). What Were the Lasting Effects of Thatcher’s Legacy for Social Security? In S.  Farrall & C.  Hay (Eds.), The Legacy of Thatcherism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hillygus, D. S., & Jackman, S. (2003). Voter Decision Making in Election 2000: Campaign Effects, Partisan Activation, and the Clinton Legacy. American Journal of Political Science, 47(4), 583–596. Jacobson, G. C. (2001). A House and Senate Divided: The Clinton Legacy and the Congressional Elections of 2000. Political Science Quarterly, 116(1), 5–27. Jenkins, S. (2007). Thatcher’s Legacy. Political Studies Review, 5(3), 161–171. Jessop, B. (2015). Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism: Dead But Not Buried. British Politics, 10(1), 16–30. Johnston, R.  J., & Pattie, C. (1990). The Regional Impact of Thatcherism. Regional Studies, 24(6), 479–493. Kingdon, J. W. (1995). Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies. New York: Pearson. Marsh, D., & Akram, S. (2015). The Thatcher Legacy in Perspective. British Politics, 10(1), 52–63. Marsh, D., & Rhodes, R. (Eds.). (1992a). Implementing Thatcherite Policies. Buckingham: Open University Press. McAllister, I., & Mughan, A. (1987). Class, Attitudes, and Electoral Politics in Britain, 1974–1983. Comparative Political Studies, 20(1), 47–71. McGuinn, P. (2016). From No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act: Federalism and the Education Legacy of the Obama Administration. Publius, 46(3), 392–415. Murie, A. (1997). Linking Housing Changes to Crime. Social Policy and Administration, 31(5), 22–36. Nagel, J. (1988). Social Choice in a Pluralitarian Democracy: The Politics of Market Liberalization in New Zealand. British Journal of Political Science, 28(2), 223–267. Nunn, A. (2014). The Contested and Contingent Outcomes of Thatcherism in the UK. Capital & Class, 38(2), 303–321.

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Peele, G. (2018). Enoch Powell and the Conservative Party: Reflections on an Ambiguous Legacy. The Political Quarterly, 89(3), 377–384. Phillips, L. (1998). Hegemony and Political Discourse: The Lasting Impact of Thatcherism. Sociology, 32(4), 847–867. Pierson, P. (2000). Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics. The American Political Science Review, 94(2), 251–267. Pierson, P. (2004). Politics in Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shanks, J. M., & Miller, W. E. (1991). Partisanship, Policy and Performance: The Reagan Legacy in the 1988 Election. British Journal of Political Science, 21, 129–197. Shipton, D., Whyte, B., & Walsh, D. (2013). Alcohol-Related Mortality in UK Cities. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 67, 805–812. Smith, M. (2015). From Consensus to Conflict: Thatcher and the Transformation of Politics. British Politics, 10(1), 64–78. Thompson, H. (2014). The Thatcherite Economic Legacy. In S. Farrall & C. Hay (Eds.), The Legacy of Thatcherism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tilley, J. (2005). Libertarian-Authoritarian Value Change in Britain, 1974–2001. Political Studies, 53(2), 442–453. Tilley, J., & Heath, A. (2007). The Decline of British National Pride. British Journal of Sociology, 58(4), 661–678. Van De Walle, N. (2009). US Policy Towards Africa: The Bush Legacy and the Obama Administration. African Affairs, 109(434), 1–21. Wittenburg, J. (2015). Conceptualizing Historical Legacies. East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 29(2), 366–378.

CHAPTER 2

Political Generations and the Fear of Crime

Abstract  The fear of crime has occupied a substantial research agenda in criminology; this extends to include theories of why people fear crime. In this exemplar, we explore how political leadership influences the fear of crime (including perceptions of antisocial behaviour). The ‘age, period and cohort’ (APC) approach we adopt recognises the distinct temporal processes of all of the following: individual ageing, current context(s) and generational membership. Following Mannheim (Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, Karl Mannheim. London: Routledge, 1928), we see this as crucial to understanding the origins and shape of social change. Employing repeated cross-sectional data from the British Crime Survey, we explore how worry about crime and perceptions of antisocial behaviour are shaped by the political environment in which respondents grew up. This exemplar shows how a political legacy may instil itself in the values which individuals hold throughout their lives. Keywords  Political generations • Age, period and cohort • Attitudes • Social change

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Farrall et al., Exploring Political Legacies, Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37006-0_2

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Introduction For almost 50 years, research on the fear of crime has been a key part of criminological research in North America, Britain and Europe. Numerous publications have explored contemporary worries about crime (Hale 1996; Farrall et al. 2009). Taken together, these studies they treat respondents as if they grew up during periods of similar political and economic character; that is to say that they overlook the possibility that each generation has its own set of concerns and anxieties relating to crime, and the idea, therefore, that these may be structured, or produced, via apolitical leadership. Our analyses test whether the political period in which a cohort ‘grew up’ exerts an effect on the way in which that cohort perceives crime. We explore if it is conceivable that the political context in which a cohort grows up, including the social and economic conditions and debates they were embedded in, may have a lasting influence on their worries about crime. For example, did growing up during Margaret Thatcher’s political ascendancy in the UK (a period in which crime rates soared and a ‘law and order’ agenda intensified, Garland 2001; Hay 1996; Loader 2008) shape this generation’s fear of crime? Does this generation differ from previous and subsequent generations? Similarly, did a political emphasis on ‘antisocial behaviour’ and growing penal populism in the late twentieth century (Burney 2005) shape the view of those who grew up during New Labour’s ascendancy such that they viewed concerns about neighbourhood incivility differently from previous generations?

Unpacking Political Generations Age, period and cohort (APC) effects are powerful variables in the analysis of long-term social change (Mannheim 1928; O’Brien 2015; Ryder 1965). Individual ageing, historical contexts and generational membership are related to the passage of time but can have separate effects. APC methods attempt to unpack three key variables when accounting for change: (i) Age effects: that is, those developmental changes that take place over an individual’s life course; (ii) Period effects: those social, cultural and economic changes that are unique to a particular historical period, and which therefore induce similar changes in individuals of all ages; and,

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(iii) Cohort effects: which are the effects of formative experiences on a particular cohort and which shape their outlook, values, attitudes or life courses in some way. This approach attempts to assess how much change (as measured in a group) is due to their aging processes; how much change is attributable to the historical period in which they were living when the data were collected and how much change can be explained in terms of the generation which the participant was a member of. By disentangling these dimensions, we are able to identify and analyse trends in behaviours or attitudes over time. Recent APC modelling has established the idea that generations socialised in different periods can report quite different values and behaviours (Grasso 2014; Grasso et al. 2017; Neundorf and Niemi 2014; Tilley 2002; Tilley and Evans 2014). Contemporary approaches to APC modelling still draw heavily on Ryder’s (1965) seminal contribution, which established the significance of the ‘cohort’ as a mechanism of social change. Ryder argued that changes in cohorts were central to societal transformations, defining a cohort as “an aggregate of individuals” with “a distinctive composition and character reflecting the circumstances of its unique origination and history” (1965: 845). Numerous studies have since confirmed that social, economic and political contexts can produce generations with distinct values and behavioural traits (Bartels and Jackman 2014; Frost 2010; Grasso 2014, 2016; Neundorf and Niemi 2014; Smets and Neundorf 2014; Tilley 2002; Tilley and Evans 2014). Because we use individual-level data (outlined below), the method we employ also allows for members of a political generation to be divided by social and individual cleavages such as gender and education. Generational theorists believe a cohort will share certain values since their formative years were spent in the same (or similar) temporal and spatial contexts. Cohort and generational theorists thus argue for the existence of non-­ linear shifts in public opinion. This assumes that a singular political generation might express attitudes and behaviours that are different from previous (or subsequent) generations (Grasso 2014). Accordingly, the shift towards New Right politics in many countries (Farrall and Hay 2014; Stiglitz 2002; Steadman-Jones 2012) during the Reagan (1981–1988) and Thatcher and Major governments (1979–1997) may, arguably, influence an individual’s perception of crime. The APC approach allows us to

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examine how attitudes may change over an extended period of time and to consider the following questions: (i) What are the age, period and cohort effects on the fear of crime? (ii) Do the findings for crime-fears remain robust when one takes into account age-period-cohort effects? (iii) What does this tell us about the legacy of Thatcherism?

What Do We Know About the Fear of Crime? The literature on the fear of crime is vast, international in context and straddles many social science disciplines (Hale 1996; Farrall et al. 2009). It became a highly topical and policy-relevant area of research during the 1960s, first in the USA, growing in influence elsewhere during the 1970s and 1980s. Surveys revealed that the fear of crime was a substantial social problem (Hale 1996; Skogan and Maxfield 1981; Warr 1990) and reported that a relatively large proportion of citizens in many countries worried about crime (Hale 1996; Hough 1995), either because they might become a victim themselves, or because it constituted a social problem in its own right. Similarly, debates around ‘antisocial behaviour’ and disorder have reached across various academic fields, although, most conspicuously in relation to criminology (Harcourt 2001; Warr 1990; Wilson and Kelling 1982). One of the first investigations into the role of disorder on influencing perceptions of crime and the environment emanated in the USA (Shaw and McKay 1942). This study found that urban neighbourhoods with high levels of poverty were likely to experience a deterioration in their social structures and institutions. Their work has been extensively developed, and today characteristics such as the physical environment, population turnover rates and ethnic heterogeneity are said to influence perceptions of crime through the mediating influence of social bonds and trust (Bursik and Grasmick 1993; Sampson et  al. 1997). In the UK of course, one must recognise the unique political and cultural relevance of the term ‘antisocial behaviour’. In the 1990s the New Labour government asserted that antisocial behaviour should be a major policy priority (Burney 2005). Antisocial behaviour referred not only to low-level criminal offences, but also to civil matters such as ‘noisy neighbours’ and ‘intimidation’ by groups of young people. For example, the Antisocial

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Behaviour Act 2003 gave the police powers to disperse groups of two or more individuals where their presence or behaviour had resulted, or was likely to result, in a member of the public being alarmed or distressed (Crawford 2009). This literature taken as a whole illustrates how concerns about both crime and antisocial behaviour have a ‘long reach’ beyond the impact of an individual incident, implying profound outcomes for one’s neighbourhood and wider society. The literature also shows how these concerns can be embedded in social and political arrangements. In Policing the Crisis, Hall et al. (1978) explored the ‘moral panic’ over young Black male robbers in the UK in the early 1970s. A central part of their argument was that robbery (or more colloquially ‘mugging’) had become a vivid metaphor for the breakdown of order, declining stability and reductions in living standards in post-war British society. Emotive discourses by politicians, policy-makers and journalists were said to have shaped the tone of debates on ‘mugging’, simultaneously redirecting public insecurities onto a marginalised Black youth population. Others too have noted that crime and disorder became a prominent feature of the political landscape since the late 1970s (Loader 2008; Garland 2001). Hay (1996) explored how the Thatcher governments reconstructed the industrial crisis of the late 1970s as being a crisis of law and order. Garland (2001) on the other hand explored how the riots of the early 1980s in London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Bristol transformed crime into a political issue of some significance, with links to issues of ethnicity, class and education. Images of excluded and disaffected young males from inner-cities resonated with the perception of “a newly dangerous, alien class” (Garland 2001: 154). Later, in the 1990s, as crime rates peaked in England and Wales, policy-­ makers became increasingly sensitive to crime and the criminal justice system. In Britain, the Home Secretary (Michael Howard) and the Shadow Home Secretary (Tony Blair, later Labour Party Leader) sought to accentuate the punitive nature of their parties’ criminal justice policies in order to reflect perceived growing punitiveness amongst the electorate. Even after crime started to fall (from 1992/1993 in England and Wales), the New Labour government (who had come into power in 1997), insisted that ‘antisocial behaviour’ constituted one of the most important problems facing British society, making it a policy priority (Burney 2005). Politicians spoke on the issue. Lord Williams, for example, stated that “Antisocial behaviour is a menace on our streets; it is a threat to our communities” (Hansard 1998). A raft of new criminal (and civil) interventions

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120 100 80 60 40

0

1950 1952 1954 1956 1958 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012

20

Fig. 2.1  Total police recorded crime rate per 1000 head: England and Wales 1950–2012. (Data Source: Office of National Statistics 2012)

were developed by the government. This included the Antisocial Behaviour Order (ASBO); dispersal powers and parenting orders (Crawford 2009). The significance of crime was not only mounting in terms of its reputation and symbolism, however. Crime rates were themselves accelerated throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Official data on property crime in England and Wales reveals a steady rate of growth for domestic burglaries from 1960 to the mid-1980s, after which there was a further increase that lasted up until 1993, with a subsequent decrease (Office for National Statistics 2012). Meanwhile, the British Crime Survey reported that residential burglary rates had more than doubled between 1981 and 1993. These then decreased by a third by 1999 (Farrington and Jolliffe 2004), the general crime following a similar pattern. While measuring long-term trends in crime is beset with technical difficulties (UK Statistics Authority 2014) most commentators agree that crime increased dramatically during the 1980s, peaking between 1992 and 1995, before declining after this point (Newburn 2007. See Fig. 2.1).

Incorporating Age, Period and Cohort Effects into Our Thinking To test whether political socialisation—one key marker of a legacy, of course—has a unique contribution over and above other effects, it is necessary to apply constraints to the APC model we developed. We do this

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Table 2.1  Political generations

Formative period Years of birth Aged 15 Total N (%)

Pre-consensus Post-war generation consensus generation

Wilson/ Callaghan generationa,b

Thatcher/ Major generation

New labour generationc

1930–1944 (14 years) 1910–1924

1945–1964 (18 years) 1925–1944

1965–1978 (13 years) 1945–1958

1979–1996 (18 years) 1959–1976

1997–2010 (13 years) 1977–1990

1925–1939 32,934 (7%)

1940–1959 118,261 (26%)

1960–1973 104,176 (24%)

1974–1992 140,569 (32%)

1993–2006 48,878 (11%)

This period includes the Conservative Heath Government of 1970–1974

a

b

This period begins in 1965 given the general election took place, untypically in the autumn of 1964

This period includes Blair and Brown in government

c

following the technique employed by Grasso (2014) and further elaborated in Grasso (2016) and Grasso et al. (2017). We first categorise the age-groups and generational cohorts we are interested in (Table  2.1), while the measure for ‘period’ (‘year of interview’) remains a continuous variable. We then run multivariate logistic regression analyses, which allow us to model social and individual characteristics alongside the political generations.

Categorising Political Generations For our purposes, we have assigned individuals to one of five political generations based on the period in which they spent the majority of their formative years. We took age 15–25 as the key period for our operationalisation of formative years, and conceived of political generations in terms of fundamental shifts in political philosophy from 1930 to 2010 (see Table 2.1). Specifically, we distinguish between the ‘pre’- and ‘post-war consensus’ generations, given that the end of World War Two marked a transformation in social and political arrangements in the UK, and the extension and consolidation of the welfare state (Paterson 2008). As Butler and Kavanagh (1997) note, the popular vote was evenly shared between the Labour and the Conservative parties at this time, emphasising what is known as the ‘political consensus’. From the mid-1960s, this political consensus began to wane (Paterson 2008); hence our third generation

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‘the Wilson/Callaghan generation’. At around this time, alternative political parties (namely the Liberals and nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales) began to gain support, as the Labour party lost support following a rise in Trade Union militancy (López 2014). There was also a discernible change in attitudes towards the welfare state, and a growing dissatisfaction with Keynesian economics in general. Such was the loss of credibility in the socio-economic and political arrangements that Labour were not elected to lead the country for almost two decades. The Conservative government from 1979–1997 (our fourth generation, the Thatcher/ Major generation) embarked on a project to ‘roll back’ the state, giving citizens greater choice, as well as greater responsibility to organise their schooling, medical care and accommodation, while reducing welfare benefits (Paterson 2008). The Conservatives also promoted a service-based economy in place of manufacturing, which was associated with a rise in unemployment and income inequality, (Hay 1996). Additionally, these Conservative administrations changed how crime and criminal justice was framed politically, with a greater emphasis on ‘law and order’ (Farrall et al. 2009; Hay 1996). Indeed, in her final election broadcast on the eve of the 1979 election, Margaret Thatcher referred to the importance of citizens ‘feeling safe in the streets’ (Riddell 1985: 193). Two decades of New Right dominance ended with the rise of ‘New Labour’, who won a convincing majority in 1997. Their leader, Tony Blair, presided over a party that endorsed market economics and which sought to synthesise capitalism and socialism. New Labour introduced the minimum wage, attempted to reduce inequality and child poverty, as well as devolving power to regional governments in Scotland and Wales (Paterson 2008). The period of New Labour rule is our final political generation. The assumption here is that each political period was sufficiently different as to warrant the distinction. This means we define ‘Thatcher’s Children’ as those born between 1959 and 1976, coming of age between 1979 and 1996. Similarly, we define the New Labour generation as those born during 1977 and 1990 whose formative years occurred between 1997 and 2010. As such, our formulation of these generations incorporates both which political party was in power and the broader political ideology it sought to promote. Of course, during the period we are investigating (1930–2010) there were other important changes. One of the most pertinent in relation to our work is the nature of long-term crime rates (see Fig. 2.1). While sociologists and criminologists have long been wary of the inferences that

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Table 2.2  Independent variables recorded crime statistics (Adjusted for 1998/1999 rule change), Homicide Independent variables included

Format

Total number of (self-reported) victimisations in previous year Recorded crime rate per 1000 head of the population for England and Walesa Year of interview Sex Age-groups (16–34; 35–59; 60+) Political generations (see Table 2.1) Ethnicity (White, Black, Indian/Pakistani; Mixed, other) Marital status (Married or cohabiting; single; widow; divorced, separated) Education status (Higher education; A/AS levels/B Tech; O levels/CSE; other/no qualifications) Employment status (Employed full-time; employed part-time; unemployed; retired/education/home-maker/other) Income status (low 25%; mid 25–75%; top 25%) Tenure (Owner/ mortgage; renters; other) Inner-city resident

Numeric Numeric Numeric Binary 3 categories 5 categories 4 categories 4 categories 4 categories 3 categories 3 categories 3 categories Binary (yes/ no)

This data is adjusted for the 1998/1999 rule change (Home Office 2012, 2014)

a

can be drawn from officially recorded crime rates, there is no doubt that crime rose dramatically from the 1930s to the 1990s (Newburn 2007). The context of rising crime impacted upon the public’s perceptions of crime and disorder (Farrall et  al. 2009). We have therefore included a measure of officially recorded crime at the time of interview, in combination with experience of victimisation within the last 12  months in our model (see Table  2.2). We hypothesise that individual attitudes will be shaped not only by the rise in officially recorded crime, but also by the types of crime that increased and the ways in which these were framed politically (Ferraro 1995; Hay 1996; Garland 2001; Sampson and Raudenbush 2004; Loader and Sparks 2016). As such, the steep rise in property crime during the Thatcher era, coupled as it was with popular debates around ‘law and order’ (Farrall et al. 2009), might have heighten the sensitivity of this generation towards greater worries about burglary than generations who came before or after. Meanwhile those who spent their formative years under New Labour might be influenced by the political discourse on antisocial behaviour of the New Labour era. To support our understanding, we explored the character of UK parliamentary debates

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2000 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0

1920S

1930S

1940S

1950S

1960S

1970S

Anti-social behaviour

Vandalism

Mugging

Burglary

1980S

1990S

2000 2005

Car Theft

Fig. 2.2  Number of debates in which key words were discussed in Parliament (Hansard) per decade 1920–2005 (The last time period is limited to January 2000 to March 2005, when the data ceases)

from 1910 to 2005 using Hansard. This data collates the Official Report of debates in Parliament and describes the number of occasions a key word or phrase was used. We tracked the number of occasions Parliament discussed six key crimes that are part of our analytic framework (see Fig. 2.2). Hansard suggests that from the 1920s until the mid-1990s there was little discussion of ‘antisocial behaviour’. This is in keeping with our expectations, since this concept emerged during the latter period of Major’s (1990–1997) premiership, as New Labour sought to develop a reputation for being ‘tough minded’ on crime and ‘antisocial behaviour’. Parliamentary debates on ‘vandalism’ began to grow from the 1950s before decreasing in the 1980s, whilst the data on ‘mugging’ and ‘burglary’ indicates a slightly different pattern; simultaneously rising in the 1960s and 1970s, before peaking in the 1980s for ‘mugging’, and in the 1990s for ‘burglary’. Again, this is in line with expectations, given the ‘moral panic’ around ‘mugging’ in the late 1970s and the dramatic rise in domestic burglary in the 1990s (Morgan 2014). Finally, government deliberations on ‘car theft’ were less common than all other crime types; references to it did not increase until later in the time period, peaking in the 1990s before quickly decreasing.

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39

Data The data we use come from the British Crime Survey (BCS) for the period between 1982 and 2010 (see Jennings et al. 2015 for a description of the dataset). The BCS is a repeated cross-sectional survey (i.e. one in which respondents are only ever interviewed once, but in which attitudinal and other questions are repeated over time).1 The collation of these surveys resulted in a dataset of over 600,000 respondents (of which 440,000 are used herein). It thus provides individual-level data on attitudes about crime as well as necessary control variables (such as age, gender and victimisation) over a sufficiently long period of time to conduct APC analyses. Our measure of official crime rates at the time of interview is the annual number of crimes for England and Wales (Home Office 2012, 2014). Our political generations (Table 2.1) form one of 13 independent variables employed in the model, alongside a range of other variables, socio-­ demographic indicators and measures of victimisation (see Table  2.2). Table 2.3 lists the dependent variables; these questions include a range of Table 2.3  Dependent variables Question set 1: Fear of crime. “Could you tell me how worried you are about...?” (1) Being mugged and robbed (1982–2010) (2) Being burgled (1982–2010) (3) Having your car stolen (1984–2010)

Question set 2: Anti-social behaviour. “How common a problem in this area are...?” (4) Vandalism or deliberate damage to property? (1982–2010) (5) Groups of teenagers hanging around? (1982–2010) (6) Noisy neighbours (1984–2010)

Original response categories (1) very worried (2) fairly worried (3) not very worried (4) not at all worried Original response categories (1) very big problem (2) fairly big problem (3) not a very big problem (4) not a problem

Recode for analysis 1/2= 1 worried 3/4= not worried

Recode for analysis 1/2= 1 a problem 3/4= 0 not a problem

1  First conducted in 1982, the BCS moved to an annual collection from 2001. As well as collecting information on victimization and fear of crime, it includes attitudinal data and demographic information. The survey sampling is structured to be representative of two groups, namely residential households in England & Wales, and adults (aged 16 years and over) living in those households. The survey does not collect information from those living in alternative accommodation. The BCS sample size has increased from 11,000 in 1982 to over 47,000 in 2005/2006.

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fears relating to property and violent crime, as well as concerns about antisocial behaviour that are available on a longitudinal basis in the BCS. The scaled measures of fear of crime and antisocial behaviour were recoded into dichotomous variables.

Results The first section of our reporting presents the APC models for the six dependent variables. The control variables were generally significant and behaved as expected. The first category (the pre-consensus generation) was the reference category in all cases. Our analyses reveal a complex story about political generations. The year of interview was significant for worry about burglary, mugging/robbery and car theft, although the odds ratios were modest. Some of the strongest significant coefficients in the model, however, relate to the political generation respondents were assigned to. The pre-consensus generation reported the lowest levels of worry about burglary, mugging/robbery and car theft when compared to all other political generations. This in itself is note-worthy; this generation was the eldest when surveyed, suggesting that the age-fear of crime relationship is only one part of the story. Compared to the reference category, the Wilson/Callaghan and Thatcher/Major generations expressed the highest level of worry about domestic burglary. Again this salient, given the fact the Thatcher generation grew up during a dramatic rise in property crime during the 1980s, and the subsequent focus on ‘law and order’ by politicians. The Wilson/Callaghan generation expressed the highest levels of worry about mugging/robbery. Of course, it was this political generation which spent their formative years in a time in which there was considerable attention on, and anxiety about, a ‘crime wave’ of ‘muggers’. More specifically this narrative was wrapped up in an overtly racist discourse which present young Black men as a threat (Hall et al. 1978). Examining car theft, we find that the New Labour and Wilson/Callaghan generations reported the highest levels of worry about theft of a car, although this offence peaked in frequency in the mid-1990s. The results presented in Table  2.4 also confirm findings previously established in the fear of crime literature. For example, recent victimisation is positively associated with worry about burglary, mugging/robbery and car theft. Similarly, officially recorded crime rates are associated with increased worry about all three of these crimes, although the odds ratios are small, and not as powerful as recent victimisation. Holding other vari-

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Table 2.4  Worry about burglary, mugging/robbery and theft of a car, APC logistic regression model

Sex (male = 1, female = 0) Age category 16–34 (Ref) Age category 34–59 Age category 60+ White (Ref) Black Asian Mixed, other Married/cohabiting (Ref) Single Widow Divorced/separated Employed full-time (Ref) Employed part-time Unemployed Education, retired, home-maker, other. Higher level education (Ref) A/AS levels/ B-tech O-levels/ CSE/ GCSE Other/ none Income – bottom 25% (Ref) Income – mid 25–75% Income – top 25% Total victimisation in previous year Total recorded crime rate per 1000 population at year of interview Inner-city (1 = inner-city resident, 2 = non inner-city) Year of interview Mortgage/owners (Ref) Rent Other/none Pre-consensus generation (Ref) Post-consensus generation Wilson/Callaghan generation Thatcher/major generation New labour generation

Worry about burglary

Worry about mugging/robbery

Worry about theft of a car

0.810∗∗∗

Odds ratios 0.466∗∗∗

0.841∗∗∗

0.993 0.938∗

0.999 1.035

0.957∗ 0.919∗∗

1.455∗∗∗ 1.894∗∗∗ 1.317∗∗∗

1.540∗∗∗ 2.631∗∗∗ 1.619∗∗∗

1.435∗∗∗ 1.670∗∗∗ 1.202∗∗∗

0.802∗∗∗ 0.771∗∗∗ 0.786∗∗∗

0.936∗∗∗ 0.829∗∗∗ 0.879∗∗∗

0.962∗ 0.816∗∗∗ 0.883∗∗∗

0.971∗ 1.106∗∗∗ 0.979

1.017 1.192∗∗∗ 1.015

0.898∗∗∗ 1.002 0.838∗∗∗

1.232∗∗∗ 1.346∗∗∗ 1.486∗∗∗

1.353∗∗∗ 1.504∗∗∗ 1.798∗∗∗

1.307∗∗∗ 1.366∗∗∗ 1.475∗∗∗

0.884∗∗∗ 0.773∗∗∗ 1.184∗∗∗ 1.005∗∗∗

0.897∗∗∗ 0.735∗∗∗ 1.119∗∗∗ 1.007∗∗∗

0.919∗∗∗ 0.744∗∗∗ 1.209∗∗∗ 1.012∗∗∗

0.745∗∗∗

0.650∗∗∗

0.713∗∗∗

0.963∗∗∗

0.976∗∗∗

0.965∗∗∗

0.970∗∗ 0.815∗∗∗

1.154∗∗∗ 1.057∗

1.134∗∗∗ 1.003

1.431∗∗∗ 1.598∗∗∗ 1.583∗∗∗ 1.482∗∗∗

1.252∗∗∗ 1.304∗∗∗ 1.141∗∗∗ 1.265∗∗∗

1.397∗∗∗ 1.545∗∗∗ 1.412∗∗∗ 1.566∗∗∗ (continued)

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Table 2.4  (continued)

Statistics Constant N Log likelihood Pseudo R2

Worry about burglary

Worry about mugging/robbery

Worry about theft of a car

70,529 341,665 453,202 0.075

41,961 340,575 417,451 0.117

69,626 263,274a 342,355 0.090

a The sample size is smaller here as the question is only fielded to people who have regular access to a car ∗p