Anger and support for retribution in Mexico’s drug war
| Author | Omar García-Ponce,Lauren E Young,Thomas Zeitzoff |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221075191 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Anger and support for retribution
in Mexico’s drug war
Omar Garcı
´a-Ponce
Department of Political Science, George Washington University
Lauren E Young
Department of Political Science, UC Davis
Thomas Zeitzoff
School of Public Affairs, American University
Abstract
How does exposure to criminal violence shape attitudes towards justice and the rule of law? Citizens care about crime
prevention and procedural legality, yet they also value punishing perpetrators for the harm they have done. We argue
that anger induced by exposure to criminal violence increases the demand for retribution and harsh punishments,
even at the expense of the rule of law. We test this theory using one observational and two experimental studies from
an original survey of 1,200 individuals in Western Mexico, a region affected by organized criminal violence and
vigilantism. First, we first show that exposure to violence is correlated with increased anger and support for punitive
justice, including vigilante actions. Second, across our two experiments, we show that citizens are more supportive of
harsh punishments and place less value on their legality in response to morally outrageous crimes. Third, we find that
the innocence of the victim, rather than the severity of the crime, is what triggers outrage and punitiveness. This
suggests that citizens may support extreme levels of violence as long as they perceive that its targets are criminals.
Finally, we show that outrageous forms of violence against civilians can lead individuals to prioritize harsh punish-
ment regardless of its legality. When criminal actors target perceived innocents with common crimes like extortion,
there is greater support for harsh, vigilante action. These patterns provide a bottom-up explanation for harsh justice.
Keywords
crime, political psychology, Mexico, political violence
Introduction
‘They kidnapped my sisters. They tried to kill my wife and
my children. And when they started going into the schools
and taking the baby girls, 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds, that
was my breaking point ...We have a lot of anger.’
–Jose
´Manuel Mireles, Autodefensa leader
(McCrummen, 2013)
In early 2013, groups of civilians in the Mexican state
of Michoaca
´n formed self-defense militias called autode-
fensas to fight against a drug cartel. For a short period in
2013, security in areas controlled by the autodefensas
seemed to improve. Yet by early 2014, some autodefen-
sas were accused of being allied with criminal organiza-
tions, while others were fighting for control of lucrative
lime orchards (Macas, 2014). The Mexican government,
unable to prevent the militias from operating, nominally
formalized them as a Rural Defense Corps. Seven years
after the emergence of the autodefensas, official statistics
show that violence in the region has worsened (Estrada,
Hinojosa & Badillo, 2019).
Corresponding author:
leyou@ucdavis.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(2) 274–290
ªThe Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00223433221075191
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The events in Michoaca
´n follow a common pattern:
outrageous crimes increase demand for harsh punish-
ment, and vigilante groups emerge to carry them out.
This dynamic is not confined to Mexico. Political parties
and leaders in Brazil, El Salvador, and the Philippines
have invoked populist appeals for punitive justice to
great electoral success, with little evidence of crime
reduction (Holland, 2013). Citizens seem to support
harsh justice policies regardless of their effectiveness.
Under what conditions does the demand for harsh pun-
ishments dominate considerations like crime prevention
or procedural legality?
We propose that anger induced by violence affects
citizens’ attitudes towards criminal justice policies. Citi-
zens care about the effectiveness of different policies. Yet,
they also want to punish perpetrators in ways that corre-
spond to their crimes. For outrageous crimes there is an
increased demand for punishment, but only certain types
– those with victims perceived as innocents – cause peo-
ple to feel outrage and prioritize retribution.
We follow other scholars in conceptualizing violence –
our independent variable of interest – as the intentional
threat or use of coercive force (Tilly, 1992). Our definition
of violence includes forms of extortion in which violence is
threatened but not carried out if victims comply with
perpetrators’ demands. Our dependent variable of interest
is support for punitive responses to crime such as the death
penalty or extrajudicial killings. Support for punitive crime
responses may be driven by a desire to deter or incapacitate
future crime, or by a preference for retribution for its own
sake. It may only apply to specific crimes, or may be
generalized to support for harsh criminal justice policy
more broadly.
There is mixed evidence on how exposure to violence
affects support for harsh punishment. In some contexts,
violence increases support for escalatory policies, while in
others it leads to conciliatory positions (Lyall, 2009;
Canetti-Nisim et al., 2009; Beber, Roessler & Scacco,
2014; Zeitzoff, 2014; Getmansky & Zeitzoff, 2014;
Hazlett, 2019). This literature rarely disaggregates the
characteristics of violence that shape citizens’ reactions
(e.g. severity, type of victim, or time since exposure) and
often remains agnostic about the mechanisms that link
violence to changes in preferences. We test our theory
on the types of violence that are most likely to cause
increases in support for violent retaliation, and provide
evidence of emotions as a specific mechanism.
We contribute to the literature on vigilantism, an
important and understudied form of violence. While
we are primarily focused on support for harsh punish-
ments, regardless of whether the state or vigilantes carry
them out, increases in punitiveness can lead citizens to
support vigilantes if the state fails to punish crimes.
Much of the literature on vigilantism focuses on struc-
tural determinants, including the legitimacy of state
security forces (Tankebe, 2009; Jung & Cohen, 2020),
availability of financial resou rces (Phillips, 2017; Ley,
Ibarra Olivo & Meseguer, 2019), and the role of local
institutions (Mattiace, Ley & Trejo, 2019; Moncada,
2019). In contrast to structural explanations, we show
that individual-level psychological processes help explain
support for harsh and vigilante punishments. Our argu-
ment builds on research linking individual-level factors
like political distrust to support for vigilantism
(Zizumbo-Colunga, 2017; Cruz & Kloppe-Santamara,
2019).
We conducted three studies to test our theory using a
survey of 1,200 residents in Western Mexico, including
areas with vigilante groups. Study 1 examines whether
those exposed to more violence prefer more punitive
policies and are angrier. Study 2 tests whether anger-
inducing scenarios cause people to prefer harsh and ille-
gal punishments. Study 3 uses 125 randomly generated
scenarios to test whether crimes that are more severe or
target innocent victims induce more anger and increase
support for harsher punishments. This set of studies
enables us to draw conclusions that are based on realistic
variation, generalize to the population of interest, and are
causal. The first study’s observational design looks at real
exposure to violence and its relationship with policy pre-
ferences and anger in a representative sample. The sec-
ond study is a survey experiment where we estimate the
effects of hypothetical exposure to outrageous violence.
In the third study, we use a factorial experiment to cau-
sally estimate the effects of different crime characteristics.
These studies yield four findings. First, exposure to
criminal violence is correlated with increased anger and
support for harsh punishments, including those by vig-
ilantes. Second, our two experiments show that morally
outrageous crimes increase support for harsh punish-
ments, and cause citizens to deprioritize the legality of
punishments. We find no evidence that exposure to vio-
lence increases support for vigilantism for its own sake.
Instead, we find that citizens turn to vigilantes because
they offer harsher punishments than the state. Third, the
innocence of victims, rather than the severity of crimes,
has the largest effect on outrage and preferences for harsh
punishments. Finally, we find no evidence that the rela-
tionship between exposure to violence and support for
harsh punishments is stronger in areas of low state secu-
rity capacity. This is suggestive evidence that the rela-
tionship between violence, anger, and support for harsh
Garcı
´a-Ponce et al. 275
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