Juvenile delinquency in the political interdiscourse

Project description

The research project "Juvenile delinquency in political interdiscourse", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and carried out at the Universities of Siegen and Bremen since July 1, 2013, is the follow-up project to the study " Juvenile delinquency in interdiscourse" conducted between May 2011 and April 2013.

While the first project focused on the institutional-professional level, the second project period from 2013 to 2015 now involves an in-depth investigation of the state and federal policy debates associated with juvenile delinquency.

The aim of the study is to reconstruct the political discourses with regard to possible punitive tendencies and to reveal the links, connections and discrepancies between the political decision-making level and the profession-specific constructions of juvenile delinquency (identified in the previous project). Of interest here is the extent to which discourse positions differ depending on different party affiliations, but also fundamentally over time and with regard to different perpetrator and delinquency images.

To this end, plenary minutes of various state parliaments (Bavaria, Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Saxony-Anhalt) as well as the Bundestag and the Bundesrat for the period between 1970 and 2009 are analyzed, in which 'juvenile delinquency' is thematically discussed.

At the methodological level, the interdiscourse analytical approach originally developed in linguistics by Jürgen Link is applied, which has been further developed, adapted and made usable for social science purposes.