(iPoster) Fear of Crime: Increased Punitiveness and Decreased Support for Redistribution

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Psychology I & II
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Psychology I

Abstract

Even though survey data has consistently shown high rates of fear of crime globally, criminal justice issues have received comparatively less attention within political science. Within the political behavior realm, it is only in the last decade that researchers have really began examining how fear of crime and victimization may affect support for democracy, political participation, and crime control preferences. Concerning the latter, if fear primarily serves the evolutionary function of seeking protection and creating a safer environment, then fear of crime should push individuals to favor all kinds of crime reduction approaches. However, mounting evidence shows that those fearful of crime are much more likely to specifically support punitive policies over those that aim to address crime’s structural causes like poverty and inequality. Nevertheless, these heightened punitiveness findings haven’t been accompanied by an equivalent inquiry into whether fear of crime may also fuel reduced support for wealth redistribution, which I argue may ultimately be two sides of the same coin, as supported by the widespread negative correlation between societies’ level of punishment and their level of welfare.

Weaving between political economy, political psychology, and criminology, I develop and empirically test a theory for why fear of crime may fuel two interrelated outcomes: an increase in individuals’ punitiveness and a decrease in their support for redistributive welfare policies. First, by promoting the sense that one’s government is failing to deliver on primordial security expectations, fear of crime should be associated with diminished political trust. As strongly supported by the literature on the relationship between political trust and policy preferences, these negative perceptions especially tend to undermine support for policies that imply greater perceived uncertainty/risk, like the future oriented wealth-redistribution approach to crime. Second, harnessing social psychological theories on threat and defense, I argue that as a form of emotional regulation, fear of crime should also negatively impact perceptions of deservingness, a core determinant of both the willingness to help via redistributive welfare policies and the willingness to punish via punitive crime control. Ultimately, I claim that this combination of reduced political trust and heightened perceptions of undeservingness should impact two core pillars undergirding both punitive and redistributive support: perceptions of the policy implementer (the government) and perceptions of the policy recipients (those in need and those expected to engage in crime). As a result of these mechanisms, I expect fearful individuals to generally demand more punishment and less solidarity.

I theorize that this should be stronger in developing contexts where perceptions of budgetary constraints and social welfare ineffectiveness are more easily activated. Thus, I empirically test and find support for a positive relationship between fear of crime and punitiveness and a negative relationship between fear of crime and support for redistribution via regression analysis of LAPOP Americas Barometer survey data for Latin American countries and 2023 CEP survey data for Chile specifically, a country that reached its maximum recorded level of fear of crime that year. These studies also offer support for the proposed mechanisms. However, recognizing the limitations of this cross-sectional observational data, I increase my claims’ causal leverage through encouraging results from an online survey experiment that aimed to increase US participants’ fear via a sensationalist crime news story.

This paper’s contributions are varied. First, it complements works that have found compelling evidence in favor of a relationship between fear of crime and increased punitiveness yet either not developed a strong theory for why or proposed mechanisms without testing them. It also adds to the redistributive preferences literature by elevating fear of crime as a potentially important determinant that has remained underexplored relative to factors like income or ideology. Crucially, because of the strong cross-national empirical association between inequality and crime, this relationship may help explain the Robin Hood paradox, where more unequal countries redistribute less even though canonical models combining self-interested redistribution preferences and the median voter theorem predict the opposite. Ultimately, the higher crime rates and increased fear that characterize unequal societies may be cultivating voters that demand a heavy over a helping hand. This could help explain broad regional dynamics like Latin America’s, which presents high rates of crime, is increasingly dominated by mano dura crime control policies, and is the world’s most unequal region. Finally, as one of the first attempts to test these relationships experimentally, this paper is also methodologically innovative.

Author

• Sofia Rivera-Sojo, Vanderbilt University