Putting Severity of Punishment Back in the Deterrence Package |
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| Authors: | Silvia M. Mendes Michael D. McDonald |
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| Affiliation: | professor of political science at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal. She researches and writes on public policy, political parties, and political behavior. Her main focus is criminal justice policy, especially criminal deterrence theory.;Chair and associate professor of political science at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His research on political representation and public policy has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, and Political Methodology |
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| Abstract: | Studies of criminal deterrence usually show an effect of certainty of punishment but often fail to find an effect of the severity. This is a serious threat to the theoretical underpinnings of deterrence theory. Through both a survey of 39 analyses in 33 published studies and our own reanalysis of an often-used data set, we show the problem rests not with the theory but with the analysis of the theory. Finding no severity effect can be traced to "unbundling the theoretical package" when moving from the theory to the statistical models used to represent the theory. |
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