Authoritarian personality and rape sentence length in conservative and liberal states.
The author tested the claim that authoritarians desire exceptionally strong punishment for rapists. Given data on 55,966 felons sentenced in 32 U.S. states in 1986 for homicide, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, and drug offenses (D. A. Bowers & J. L. Waltman, 1993) and given state conservatism scores of 141,798 respondents to 122 1976-1988 CBS and The New York Times national telephone polls (R. Erikson, G. Wright, & J. McIver, 1993) as proxies for authoritarianism, regression analyses showed state conservatism accounted for 18.9%, F(1, 18) = 7.11, p < .01, of the rape sentence length variance when sentence lengths for the 7 other offenses were controlled for and 12.5%, F(1, 27) = 8.16, p < .01, with means substituted for missing data. In both analyses, state conservatism and rape sentence length were positively correlated.
McCann
Stewart J H
SJ
Department of Psychology, Cape Breton University, PO Box 5300, 1250 Grand Lake Road, Sydney, Nova Scotia B1P 6L2, Canada. stewart_mccann@cbu.ca
D000374:Aggression / Q000523:psychology; D001318:Authoritarianism; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D011678:Punishment; D011902:Rape / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence* / Q000523:psychology*