Contemporary Public Policy towards Prostitution Regulation on a Global Scale

This thesis examines different classifications of prostitution policies and compares them to contemporary prostitution policies around the world. It examines 4 classifications commonly used in prostitution policy research and points out lack of their empirical verification, especially outside of select country cases. This quantitative study relies on average-linkage hierarchical clustering method using Hamming distance measure and applies it to a novel dataset based on national legislative documents and other sources of data about prostitution policy, that contains 205 instances of different prostitution regimes. While a number of subtypes consistent with existing research and discourse (such as the Nordic Model) can be established based on the data, my overall findings indicate that both policy research and policy discussion needs to move from using simple classifications based on laws to broader classifications that reflect intent and implementation of the studied policies, such as Petra Östergren’s 2017 classification. The conclusion provides potential avenues for further research and application of the dataset.