TY - JOUR
T1 - Political Ideology and Concerns About White-Collar Crime
T2 - Exploring the Switch Hypothesis
AU - Kroska, Amy
AU - Schmidt, Marshall R.
AU - Schleifer, Cyrus
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 by the Southwestern Social Science Association
PY - 2019/8
Y1 - 2019/8
N2 - Objective: Numerous studies show that political conservatives in the United States are more concerned about crime than are political liberals. But, according to the “switch hypothesis,” the direction of the association should reverse when the focus is on reducing and punishing white-collar crime. Despite the intuitiveness of this hypothesis, however, only one study to date has directly tested it. Method: We explore the hypothesis using data from an online survey administered to undergraduate, graduate, and law students at a southern university. We include a wide range of controls, including demographic attributes, socioeconomic indicators, street crime victimization, white-collar crime victimization, and a composite measure of trust in professionals. Results: As hypothesized, political conservatives are less concerned about reducing and punishing white-collar crime than are political liberals, and the association is stronger for men than it is for women, patterns that hold with and without the controls. The main effect of conservatism also holds (1) when examined with structural equation modeling, (2) when each item of the dependent variable is examined separately with stereotype logistic regression, and (3) when the sample is weighted to match the gender and race/ethnicity distribution in the population from which it was drawn. Conclusion: Consistent with the switch hypothesis, the results suggest that conservatives are less concerned about white-collar crime than are liberals.
AB - Objective: Numerous studies show that political conservatives in the United States are more concerned about crime than are political liberals. But, according to the “switch hypothesis,” the direction of the association should reverse when the focus is on reducing and punishing white-collar crime. Despite the intuitiveness of this hypothesis, however, only one study to date has directly tested it. Method: We explore the hypothesis using data from an online survey administered to undergraduate, graduate, and law students at a southern university. We include a wide range of controls, including demographic attributes, socioeconomic indicators, street crime victimization, white-collar crime victimization, and a composite measure of trust in professionals. Results: As hypothesized, political conservatives are less concerned about reducing and punishing white-collar crime than are political liberals, and the association is stronger for men than it is for women, patterns that hold with and without the controls. The main effect of conservatism also holds (1) when examined with structural equation modeling, (2) when each item of the dependent variable is examined separately with stereotype logistic regression, and (3) when the sample is weighted to match the gender and race/ethnicity distribution in the population from which it was drawn. Conclusion: Consistent with the switch hypothesis, the results suggest that conservatives are less concerned about white-collar crime than are liberals.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85065330010&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/ssqu.12654
DO - 10.1111/ssqu.12654
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85065330010
SN - 0038-4941
VL - 100
SP - 1685
EP - 1698
JO - Social Science Quarterly
JF - Social Science Quarterly
IS - 5
ER -