What factors influence support for harsher sentences for convicts in the UK?
The legal system only functions with public support (Kaukinen & Colavecchia, 1999), so sentencing is often carried out in a punitive way to ‘appease’ the public. However, the British people might not be as punitive as thought (Mattinson & Mirrlees-Black, 2000). The assumption of penal populism, therefore, could be misleading. There is only a handful of studies looking at factors behind punitive attitudes in the UK (Maruna & King, 2009) (Gerber & Jackson, 2016) (Palasinski & Shortland, 2017), so my research will add to a much-needed field of study. In particular, I look at party vote, an uncommon approach to this sort of question.
The hypothesis was “right-wing ideological self-placement increases support for harsher sentences”, and to test it, I used a logistic regression analysis of 2019 General Election Survey data, with the dependent variable ‘dis/agreement with support for stiffer sentences’ and the independent variables ‘2019 party vote’, ‘age’, ‘education’ and ‘ideological self-placement’. I found that right-wing ideological self-placement, voting for the Conservative Party and identification with religion were positively associated with supporting harsher sentences for lawbreakers. Attainment of higher education and age were negatively associated with support for harsher sentences for lawbreakers.
Future research could build upon mine by taking socioeconomic class into account, as it could affect perceptions of and therefore attitudes to crime, modifying support for harsher sentences. A multi-item measure of ideology could also be used to avoid the problem of people interpreting the left-right scale differently.