Project Summary: This research project intended to explain the simultaneous stability of criminal justice policies and erosion of police reform in developing democracies by the logic of blame avoidance. We propose that politicians implement and state officials, such as judges, enforce tough penal policies to avoid blame for rare yet politically damaging events. We chose Argentina because it is a case of an upper-middle income country yet with weak formal institutions. During the thirty years since the return of democracy, it has undergone the contradictory processes of criminal justice reform and implementation of punitive policies, on the one hand, and repeated attempts to implement police reform which have often been eroded or reversed. In particular, we selected Buenos Aires because of its political importance within the country, and because, given that it is not the province with less independent judiciary, we could expect that pressure on the judiciary from the government -one of our mechanisms of interest- would not be exceptionally high.
Data Abstract:This project has relied on both qualitative and quantitative data. With respect to qualitative evidence, we have reviewed four national and one local newspaper in reference to criminal justice and police reforms occurring in the province of Buenos Aires during the period under consideration (1997-2012). We are depositing a list of these articles as well as their respective URLs.
We have incorporated into our publicly available archive our records of interviews that could be fully anonymized. These take the form of notes from the interviews, since the interviews themselves were not recorded. To anonymize the data we have removed all personal or geographic references that could reveal the identity of the informant.
We have also conducted interviews with various public officials, such as former governors, security ministers or judges who have been prosecuted. These interviews with critical actors are impossible to anonymize without eliminating details that are crucial to the narratives described by the authors and the understanding of the causal mechanisms involved in the studied process. Contrary to the previous group of interviewees, the population of possible respondents that could have been interviewed is sufficiently small such that they could be more easily identifiable. While our interviewees agreed to be recorded and cited throughout the paper, they did not explicitly agree to have the entirety of the interview be made publicly available. Therefore, we wish to respect their wishes in this regard and are not sharing these interview transcripts in any form.
The article also relies on quantitative data, which we have included in this QDR dataset. These include time-series data on the crucial variables (mainly state-level incarceration rates, convicting sentencing rates, proportions of the prison population that is unconvicted, and crime rates for specific crimes such as homicides, violent crimes and property crimes) obtained from the Argentine National Penitentiary System annual reports and from the Center of Legal and Social Studies (CELS), an NGO specialized in human rights and criminal justice reform. Other types of qualitative data (newspaper articles, reports) have been prepared so as to be presented in the form of a spreadsheet containing all the basic information – newspaper, title, date, by-line (when relevant) – and their specific URL. (QDR has added, in the spreadsheet, a stable URL version of these links as well.) We sought articles concerning the implementation of the most relevant criminal justice and police reforms enacted in the province between 1997 and 2012, to complement and contextualize the information provided by our interviewees. We checked three of the main national print newspapers (La Nación, Clarín, and Página12) and one of the main national digital newspapers (La Política Online, www.lapoliticaonline.com), as well as the leading provincial newspaper from the provincial capital (El Dia). We also consulted newspaper articles on police and criminal justice reform in our two shadow cases -Venezuela and El Salvador- to complement scholarly research on these areas in each case, where required.
Our quantitative database on prison population required no special preparation for sharing in this deposit, beyond the necessary compilation involved in the original collection process.
