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Objective Numerous studies show that political conservatives in the United States are more concerned about crime than are political liberals. But, according to the “switch hypothesis,” the direction of the association should reverse when the focus is on reducing and punishing white‐collar crime. Despite the intuitiveness of this hypothesis, however, only one study to date has directly tested it. Method We explore the hypothesis using data from an online survey administered to undergraduate, graduate, and law students at a southern university. We include a wide range of controls, including demographic attributes, socioeconomic indicators, street crime victimization, white‐collar crime victimization, and a composite measure of trust in professionals. Results As hypothesized, political conservatives are less concerned about reducing and punishing white‐collar crime than are political liberals, and the association is stronger for men than it is for women, patterns that hold with and without the controls. The main effect of conservatism also holds (1) when examined with structural equation modeling, (2) when each item of the dependent variable is examined separately with stereotype logistic regression, and (3) when the sample is weighted to match the gender and race/ethnicity distribution in the population from which it was drawn. Conclusion Consistent with the switch hypothesis, the results suggest that conservatives are less concerned about white‐collar crime than are liberals.

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A white-collar offender’s role and the organizational culture in which the crime occurs affects subjective evaluations of offender culpability. However, how they affect responsibility attributions and punitiveness is unclear. We examine attribution processes by conducting a factorial experiment to test a proposed model. We test attribution theory derived predictions using innovative methods of scale creation and nonparametric analyses. Participants attribute more responsibility and are more punitive of individuals and offenders in organizational cultures where illegality is atypical. Our five proposed dimensions of responsibility are predictive of responsibility attributions, and path analysis shows offender role and offense environment affect how the five dimensions of responsibility affect attributions. Our findings have implications for criminal justice and adjudication processes and corporate regulation.

Research on the effect of an offender’s occupational prestige on criminal sentencing shows mixed results, with some studies showing a positive association between prestige and sentence severity and others showing a negative association. We revisit this question using an online vignette experiment. Drawing on affect control theory and its computer program, Interact, we hypothesize that an offender’s occupational prestige will increase the recommended sentence and that post-crime, or transient, impressions of the offender’s potency will mediate this effect. We find support for both hypotheses: Occupational prestige increases the recommended sentence, and post-crime impressions of the offender’s potency mediate this effect. The mediation is partial when potency is measured with semantic differentials, and it is complete when potency is measured with a set of explicit, denotative items. We also explore the mediational role of post-crime impressions of the offender’s evaluation and activity. Although offender activity does not function as a mediator, offender evaluation plays a minor mediational role when offender potency is also controlled. We also find an interaction between post-crime offender evaluation and potency, with participants recommending a lighter sentence for offenders they see as both weak and evaluatively neutral. We discuss the empirical, theoretical, and methodological implications of these findings and outline avenues for future research.