Adventures in populist discourse: Could a solution to penal populism in New Zealand be hiding in plain sight?

Abstract

A longstanding policy problem for advocates of progressive penal reform in New Zealand has been the existence of a seemingly punitive public. Internationally, some scholars claim that such punitive attitudes are poorly understood and highly manipulable. Frost (2010) argued that the survey data used to validate claims of a punitive public could be prone to methodological flaws, casting doubt on the true popularity of increasingly punitive law and order policies. Even today, there are few challenges to the epistemological primacy of public opinion surveys that rely on closed and leading questions to reinforce claims of an enduring public punitiveness. Meanwhile, Roberts et al. (2002) have suggested that those wishing to neutralise the drivers of penal populism might want to draw upon a more incendiary style of rhetoric, one which pointedly refers to the wastefulness of prisons and not just their failings or limitations.

The central question of this thesis is what might come of a free-market populist argument being deployed by political actors advocating for decarceration. To establish the potential utility of populism as a tool for decarceration, this thesis begins with an autoethnographic account of prison, prisoners, and public attitudes to both, then teases apart the potential of populism as a political tool through a retrospective case study of decarceration during the tenure of a free-market populist in the Canadian province of Alberta. Drawing on this case study and the theoretical literature on populism, an experimental tool was developed for use as part of a New Zealand-wide public opinion survey. The experimental tool tested two contrasting arguments for decarceration: a free-market populist-style argument and a status quo argument.

The results of this experiment give a variety of insights that would have otherwise been obscured by more conventional public opinion surveys. The first was that participants were more likely to support a populist-style argument for decarceration, with subgroup analysis suggesting such an argument was favoured by those on the right of the political spectrum. Secondly, those identifying on the right were most likely to oppose the status quo argument for decarceration, evidently due to its focus on human rights, the impacts of colonisation, and systemic racism. Finally there was limited evidence to suggest a populist-style argument for decarceration would precipitate more punitive responses from survey participants.

In drawing out the conclusions of these findings, this thesis contributes to the contemporary political and sociological understandings of public opinion on law and order by demonstrating how such pervasive neoliberal and populist rhetoric can be reconfigured to achieve decarceration goals.