Reassessing the missing link in general deterrence research: A behavioral economic approach

Purpose: Given the increasing application of behavioral economics within criminology, the present investigation seeks to reassess the ‘missing link’ in general deterrence research from the angle of coherent arbitrariness. Such an effort seeks to bridge the divide between two competing positions within the literature: one that views the lack of correspondence between actual and perceived indicators of punishment as a challenge to the theoretical construct, while the other views this lack of correspondence as both misleading and uninformative for deterrence research. Methods: Drawing on a dataset of certainty, severity, and celerity estimates from 1500 respondents nested in 54 urban counties, the transitivity of individual-level punishment perceptions were mapped against similarly rank-ordered, county-specific punishment risk levels. Clustered Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were estimated to compare these deterrence constructs. Results: After adjusting for an important source of measurement error in elicited risk perceptions, results indicated significant differences, and thus a lack of correspondence, between the rank-orderings of actual and perceived levels of punishment certainty, severity, and celerity. Conclusions: The continuing lack of calibration between perceptions of punishment risk and objective levels of the certainty, severity, and celerity of punishment requires additional theorization and analysis within criminology, broadly, and deterrence scholarship, specifically.