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      Jobs and Punishment: Public Opinion on Leniency for White-Collar Crime

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          Abstract

          Governments routinely offer deals to companies accused of white-collar crimes, allowing them to escape criminal charges in exchange for fines or penalties. This lets prosecutors avoid costly litigation and protects companies’ right to bid on lucrative public contracts, which can reduce the likelihood of bankruptcies or layoffs. Striking deals with white-collar criminals can be risky for governments because it could affect the perceived legitimacy of the legal system. This article explores the conditions under which the general public supports leniency agreements. Building on theoretical intuitions from the literature, we identify three characteristics that could affect mass attitudes: home bias, economic incentives, and retribution. We conduct a survey experiment in the United States and find moderate support for leniency agreements. Whether the crime occurs on US soil or abroad does not affect public opinion, and the number of jobs that would be jeopardized by criminal prosecution only has a small effect. Instead, survey respondents become much more supportive of a deal when it includes criminal charges for the corporate managers who were personally involved in the alleged wrongdoing. In the court of public opinion, punishing a handful of individuals appears to matter more than saving thousands of jobs.

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          Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes

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            The Role of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for Policing

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              The Seriousness of Crimes: Normative Structure and Individual Differences

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Polit Res Q
                Polit Res Q
                spprq
                PRQ
                Political Research Quarterly
                SAGE Publications (Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA )
                1065-9129
                1938-274X
                19 May 2023
                December 2023
                : 76
                : 4
                : 1751-1763
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Ringgold 5622, universityUniversité de Montréal; , Montreal, QC, Canada
                [2 ]Ringgold 1812, universityHarvard University; , Cambridge, MA, USA
                Author notes
                [*]Simon St-Georges, Political science Department, Université de Montréal, 3150, rue Jean-Brillant, Montréal, QC H3C 3J7, Canada. Email: simon.st-georges@ 123456umontreal.ca
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1189-8007
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8102-938X
                Article
                10.1177_10659129231176211
                10.1177/10659129231176211
                10615619
                db9ca750-ae8b-4474-8eeb-3d5cca1b8e97
                © The Author(s) 2023

                This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page ( https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

                History
                Funding
                Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FundRef https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000155;
                Award ID: #435-2019-0434
                Categories
                Articles
                Custom metadata
                ts10

                public opinion,criminal law enforcement,white-collar crime,corporate leniency,deferred prosecution agreements

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