Are Conservatives More Punitive to Criminal Offenders than Liberals? A Moral Foundations Approach
Open Access
Author:
Petrovani Bird, Alana
Area of Honors:
Sociology
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Eric Silver, Thesis Supervisor Stacy Silver, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
punishment political ideology moral foundations theory public opinion
Abstract:
Prior research shows that conservatives are more punitive than liberals. Little, however, is known about why. Drawing on data from a 2021 national survey of US adults (n = 1,125), the current study builds on prior research by Silver and Silver (2017) by testing the hypothesis that the reason conservatives are more punitive than liberals is that they possess different moral concerns. Specifically, the current study hypothesizes that the association between political ideology and punitiveness is spuriously related to the underlying moral foundations that people endorse. Bivariate and multivariate results affirm this assertion by showing that the association between political ideology and punitiveness is spuriously related to people’s group-oriented moral foundations (loyalty, authority, and sanctity) and, to a lesser extent, their individual-oriented moral foundations (harm and fairness). Together, these results affirm previous findings reported by Silver and Silver (2017) and suggest that studies that fail to consider people’s underlying moral concerns risk overstating the relationship between conservatism and punitiveness.
