Title: “The limits of deliberation: Experimental evidence on punitive justice attitudes in Mexico”

Abstract: Does deliberation decrease support for punitive responses to crime in a high-violence, high-impunity context? We test the behavioral theories that support for harsh punishments such as lynchings or long prison sentences are driven by either 1) fast, emotional thinking, or 2) inaccurate beliefs, especially about descriptive norms. We ran a field experiment in Michoacán, Mexico, to evaluate whether citizen deliberation sessions changes citizen preferences for how to respond to crime. We test two versions of the deliberation: 1) a standard deliberation focused on sharing information and carefully weighing costs and benefits; 2) and a deliberation where participants were also encouraged to consider and regulate their emotions. Neither deliberation reduced support for punitive crime responses, and the emotion-enhanced deliberation may have increased support for harsh punishments. Our findings suggest that in high-violence, high-impunity contexts, support for harsh punishments is not driven by misperceptions of descriptive norms or unwanted emotional reactions. In sum, deliberation does not moderate criminal justice attitudes in a context where participants do not see alternatives to harsh punishments and find negative emotional reactions to crime to be useful.

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