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Subjective Proximity to Crime or Social Representations? Explaining Sentencing Attitudes in Switzerland

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Abstract

Lay sentencing attitudes are considered in the light of two theoretical perspectives. The first perspective views sentencing attitudes as parts of broader sets of social representations anchored in one’s position in the social structure. The second perspective explains sentencing attitudes by their subjective experiences of crime. This paper tests both theories by performing a series of multiple regressions on two dimensions of sentencing: punishment goals and severity of punishment. Empirical data comes from a quantitative survey conducted in Switzerland. Findings reveal that indicators of subjective proximity to crime largely account for sentencing attitudes. Nevertheless, social representations of crime measured by causes of crime also have a significant impact on sentencing attitudes. Implications of these findings for sentencing in Western democracies are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Note that the relatively low scores of Cronbach’s alphas are due to the limited number of indicators included in each scale (between three and four indicators).

  2. In order to ensure that the results were not affected by the non-normal distribution of the dependent variables, we also transformed the goals of punishment and severity of punishment into categorical variables and performed ordinal regressions on them. Results of linear regression models and results of ordinal models end up to be almost identical (tables not presented).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grant 100011-112032 (“Les déterminants sociaux des finalités et de l’évaluation d’une juste peine dans les mentalités contemporaines”) of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre d’étude, de technique et d’évaluation législatives (CETEL), Faculty of Law, University of Geneva, bd du Pont-d’Arve 40, 1211, Geneva 4, Switzerland

    Raphaël Hammer

  2. Department of Sociology, Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Geneva, bd du Pont-d’Arve 40, 1211, Geneva 4, Switzerland

    Eric D. Widmer

  3. Department of Criminal Law, Faculty of Law, University of Geneva, bd du Pont-d’Arve 40, 1211, Geneva 4, Switzerland

    Christian-Nils Robert

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  1. Raphaël Hammer
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Correspondence to Raphaël Hammer.

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Hammer, R., Widmer, E.D. & Robert, CN. Subjective Proximity to Crime or Social Representations? Explaining Sentencing Attitudes in Switzerland. Soc Just Res 22, 351–368 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-009-0094-3

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