I am very grateful to David Skarbek for his thorough review of my book. Indeed, The Partisan Politics of Law and Order was intended to contribute to the literature on the politics of criminal justice by adding the perspective of party competition to better understand the variance among Western democracies beyond the United States. I am happy that Skarbek finds this angle a relevant addition and sees merit in the combination of large-N quantitative studies and individual case studies. Nevertheless, the review also raises some questions regarding findings and methodology. I briefly comment on these issues and relate them to the broader discussions about the politics of criminal justice.

In his review, Skarbek asks why the book does not discuss interest group influence on penal policies more systematically. Indeed, although I do mention interest groups in the chapter on policy feedback, they do not have a prominent place, neither in theory nor in the findings. The reason is that groups such as police unions, unions of criminal justice social workers, and prison guards do not feature prominently in the literature on the Western European cases studied in the book, nor does my case study evidence indicate that they have played a prominent role. This is perhaps due to the fact that politicizing security actually works in favor of their goals, such as tougher sentences or more resources. Hence, there was little need to go in the streets to protest or to heavily lobby politicians. In any event, my findings indicate that the key driving forces are found in partisan politics and not in interest group influence. The only exception may be the lobbying efforts of crime victims— as indicated in the policy-feedback chapter—which seem to have contributed to processes of politicization of security issues in some cases.

Skarbek’s review also asks how the method of causal process tracing is useful in conjunction with large-N analyses, particularly if certain features of the cases do not support patterns found in large-N data. Whereas one can criticize this methodological choice as rendering “theories unfalsifiable,” I would argue instead that such an approach helps carve out mechanisms that are not visible on an aggregate level. Consequently, if a certain explanation does not hold in a large-N data analysis, one can well argue that it does not seem to be systematically related to the variance in the research sample. However, this does not rule out that, in a certain case, the same variable has been part of a political process that led to the outcome in question.

Finally, perhaps the most important point raised by Skarbek refers to the generalizability of the results to the US context or, more generally, to federal systems. Although I see the US case as indeed rather exceptional (due to ethnic issues and the legality of firearms), it is an interesting question whether federalism may play a role here. For the United States, Lisa Miller (The Perils of Federalism, 2008) has shown how federalism may amplify dynamics of penal harshness. However for the German case, also a federal system, I do not find such evidence. This may be due to the lack of penal policy competences on the subnational level, but even in the realm of policing, where the Länder do have a say, federalism did not seem to lead to upscaling dynamics of law and order harshness. This seems to point to the fact that federalism may in some constellations be important to explain overall criminal justice politics, as in the United States, but that it depends on the broader political context whether these features actually play a role. Nevertheless, it would be an interesting starting point for a comparative study to investigate these impacts of federalism in more depth.