A Legitimacy-Based Approach to Punitiveness: An Analysis of the Influence of Political Legitimacy on Citizens' Attitudes Towards Punishment in Latin America

Latin America has experienced a serious increase in public punitiveness in the past decades. Although many factors explaining people's attitudes towards punishment have been identified and empirically tested in previous research efforts, these have had a distinct focus on the Global North, thus leaving the Global South and Latin America in particular, void of adequate contextually relevant explanations for this rise in public punitiveness. In this thesis, I build on research from comparative politics and criminology to introduce a novel theoretical framework that places political legitimacy as an important determinant of public punitiveness in Latin America. With this legitimacy-based approach to punitiveness, I examined the extent to which, and how, political legitimacy influences public attitudes towards punishment in Latin America.

Using data from the AmericasBarometer (LAPOP) survey, I first tested the model empirically from a cross-sectional standpoint, looking at 10 countries in South America. Results from multinomial logistic regression showed that political legitimacy was a consistent predictor of citizens increased punitiveness in the region. These results further indicated that the link between political legitimacy and punitiveness was specific to certain dimensions of legitimacy, particularly those associated with institutional legitimacy. A second empirical exercise was conducted to test the model over time focusing on the specific case of Chile. Results from this time-series analyses supported the findings from the cross-sectional study and indicated that decreased political legitimacy was also a consistent predictor of increased punitiveness in Chile.

Overall, this thesis highlights the impact that context-specific factors may have in influencing citizens' support for crime control policies in Latin America. The findings from this thesis also bring to light the importance of the multidimensionality of political legitimacy, and suggest that not accounting for the multiple dimensions of political legitimacy may potentially obscure important relationships that may appear evident only when disaggregating the construct.