This dissertation explores public attitudes towards criminal punishment in Western societies and seeks to explain why some individuals are more punitive than others. A model of punitiveness with several domains of focus for explaining variation in punitiveness including objective risk of crime, conservative climate, and population diversity at the country level and demographics, conservative worldview and perceptions of crime, law and order at the individual level is tested with data on punitiveness from two multinational surveys using hierarchical logistic regression techniques. Analyses reveal that males, married individuals, and those who are concerned about crime are more punitive. The rest of the findings are specific to the way punitiveness is measured. Individuals younger than age 45, individuals who perceive the police as ineffective and individuals who have been victims of violent crime tend to prefer incarceration for a recidivist burglar. Those who believe in a personal God are more supportive of the death penalty while individuals with higher levels of religiosity are less in favor of the death penalty. Further, individuals who live in societies with more religious heterogeneity and where public belief in a literal hell is more prominent are most likely prefer a prison sentence for a recidivist burglar and individuals who live in countries with higher levels of lethal violence are more in favor of the death penalty. Religious heterogeneity and public belief in hell account for 42% of the variation across Western societies in preference for prison for a repeat burglar while homicide rate accounts for over 75% of the variation in support for capital punishment across Western societies. Conservative religious belief at the contextual level appears to be positively related to support for capital punishment indirectly through the homicide rate suggesting that support for the death penalty may be influenced by the normality of lethal violence in society dependent in part on contextual levels of conservative religious belief. This dissertation enhances the understanding of punitiveness by providing the most comprehensive multi-level study of public punitiveness to date and proves that religious factors, both personal and contextual, are central to understanding variation in attitudes toward punishment. / text

published_or_final_version / Housing Management / Master / Master of Housing Management

published_or_final_version / Housing Management / Master / Master of Housing Management

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning and Design / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

Research has shown that criminal justice policy in Western democratic societies has become increasingly punitive (e.g. Wilson and Petersilia 2010), and that the public largely supports these policies, despite the fact that crime rates have been declining (e.g. Roberts 2003). However, few studies have attempted to explain this paradox in the context of neoliberalism, and within a Canadian context. Using the 2011 and 1997 Canadian Election Study, this project employs logistical regression and a comparative analysis to examine the extent to which neoliberal governance has produced prejudicial attitudes towards racialized “Others,” social and economic insecurity, and attitudes that individualize causes of poverty, and the extent to which these factors predict support for punitive treatment of violent young offenders. The results of this study show that the advent of neoliberalism has precipitated racialized “othering” towards Aboriginal people, which has increased punitive attitudes, but that insecurity and individualization, in relations to punitive attitudes, was present previous to 1997. / October 2015

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences / Department of Government and Public Administration

This dissertation contains two essays that use empirical techniques to shed light on open questions in the asset pricing literature. In the first essay, I investigate whether foreign institutional investors affect stock liquidity in domestic equity markets. The evidence indicates that stocks with higher foreign institutional ownership subsequently experience higher liquidity. However, it is difficult to interpret the causal relation of this finding because institutional investors self-select into more liquid stocks. To solve this problem, I exploit a provision in the 2003 US dividend tax cut which extends tax-relief to dividends from US tax-treaty countries but not to dividends from non-treaty countries. This natural experiment suggests a causal link between foreign institutional investors and liquidity. Consistent with the predictions of theoretical models, I find that liquidity improves due to foreign institutional investors increasing information competition. In the second essay, I introduce a new measure of difference of opinion using mutual fund portfolio weights to test prominent competing theories of the effect of heterogeneous beliefs on asset prices. The over-valuation theory (Miller (1977)) proposes that in the presence of short-sale constraints stock prices reflects only the view of optimistic investors which implies lower subsequent returns. Alternatively, neo-classical asset pricing models (Williams (1977), Merton (1987)) suggest that differences of opinions indicate high levels of information uncertainty or risk which implies higher expected returns. My initial result finds no support for the over-valuation theory. Instead, the measure used in this study finds that high differences of opinion stocks weakly outperform low differences of opinion stocks by 2.42% annually which is more consistent with the information uncertainty explanation. / text

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Comparative Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts